Conscientious Blogging
Let me tell you, writing about things these days is pretty much impossible. Thanks to the modern miracles of education and instant communication, hundreds of more intelligent, more well-read individuals than I have complete, unmoderated access to the content of my long-lived, infrequently-pruned blog. Given my awareness of how woefully I stack up against the intellect of close friends, it has become all but impossible for me to feel confident about almost any worthwhile topic. Things interesting me at the moment, for example, include the ongoing state of the negative influence of religion. But there are dozens of popular godless blogs dealing with commentary on that situation, all of them together having covered all the pertinent issues beforehand and leaving the only scope for new ideas as comment on news stories. So any relevant content is going to be second-hand at least, and nobody will want to read amateurish, immaturely-toned blog posts about what they could get on any news website.
Even if I were to come across my own first-hand news, there are those who are far better schooled in language than I who could do significantly more readable work presenting said news. There are plenty of people I know personally with more insight, more imagination and more skill in conveying persuasively exactly what they mean. This means I am ruled out of writing about other things that interest me as well, such as films I’ve seen. All the things I used to be the only one doing are now being done much better by all these new people I know.
It has left me feeling unqualified to write about anything but myself, and I am not such an interesting person that I could create successful content out of that. Nor do I feel like I could create something genuinely humorous for entertainment, even by writing about the topics I used to, but from behind a thick fog of feigned ignorance. Being exposed to real people who can write well has eliminated nearly everything I used to be able to do by showing it up to be so far from acceptable quality that it loses all value.
I still often have brief flashes of inspiration, where I’ll realise that most people are dreadfully wrong about something, but too often they can be summed up in one or maybe two 140-character posts, so never make it this far.
Up until this point, you might be thinking I am just having a little self-pitying whinge about personal inadequacies, but that’s not really what I am driving at. I’m just looking for a new angle to approach writing from, since it’s something I do really enjoy doing, and this is my little way of asking you to bear with me while I come up with something to do.
on December 28th, 2009 at 8:34 am
I feel the same way.
I often scrap drafts which I don’t feel I can back up with sufficient enough arguments or that I will have a problem defending when I need to. However I think there are two good reasons to continue posting despite these problems.
The first is that everyone is entitled to their opinion. Even if we don’t grant it much value, they’re still entitled to it and I’m entitled to mine. At least if I voice my thoughts then it adds weight to the argument and even after everything in such a post has been utterly destroyed I can still claim a moral victory in that I “encouraged debate.”
The second is that the internet isn’t usually that full of people who know more about a subject than you - more usually it’s full of people who think they know about a subject than you.
So I find you can usually sit back and let the comments come knowing that even those they are using big sounding words they looked up on thesaurus.com their arguments are actually no more valid than yours.
One final thing I have started to do now is stay out of the discussions on the comments. When I put up a piece that people disagree with, a good example of this was my piece on climate change recently it is soon populated by a long list of comments telling me I’m wrong.
I don’t agree with most of these comments indeed some of the people who commented missed the point entirely. But I didn’t comment back because I didn’t want to get drawn into a long discussion about it, I just don’t care. I put the piece out there, if people don’t like it, think it’s derivative, amateurish or just plain wrong they can unsubscribe to my blog. Until everyone does I think it’s safe to presume somebody thinks it’s worth reading.