Slowblogging

What with my laziness, and Simon’s family obligations and second career as a travelling carnival strongman, things can get awful quiet here at tuppenceworth acres. So it was very gratifying to come across this, the Slow Blogging Manifesto. It’s author encourages others to add to it or write their own. As a lot of it chimes with some thoughts I’ve recently had on blogging, I offer the following:

The corporate culture of pitching ideas has downgraded complexity and difficulty to the degree where we’re only interested in bite-sized thoughts that can be summed up in tidy, glib phrases. Life is not tidy or glib, and neither should our attempts to make sense of, or meaningfully comment on it.

Though I have a Twitter account, and have defended it to sceptics, I’m not entirely sold on it as a medium. I don’t think you can rationally discuss anything in bites of 140 characters. You might as well try discussing astrophysics in a nightclub.

I hate it when my favourite blogs go quiet for a long time. But I hate it more when they post very short posts that would have been better if they were longer. All my favourite bloggers write long posts.

Unfortunately, all my least favourite ones write even longer ones. Going on and on forever is as often a sign of ego and bad writing as it is of actual thought. A bad long post is quicker to write than a good short one. One tiny idea, padded out to last forever is not my idea of a good time.

I rarely write about something that has just popped into my mind. I usually live with the idea for at least a few days, sometimes weeks, before I write it. No matter how long I let an idea gestate before blogging, I always read back over the post later and think I could have said it better. I have notions in my head I’ve been thinking about writing about for months. I hope to get them into words sometime, but if I don’t, it won’t be the end of the world. There are worse things than keeping your mouth shut.

I use my blog as a place to put things that I’ve written. I don’t write so as to have something to put on my blog. Sometimes I worry that I haven’t blogged for a while, but I don’t like putting up a video or a link just so as I can have posted something.

I have taken issue with the sometimes expressed notion that the internet turns people into assholes. But the truth is, sometimes it does. I hate to see people ganged up on by people who would never act like that in real life, or without a gang around them. It would happen less if everyone would slow down, and maybe take the occasional moment to breathe. On the other hand, we are not obliged to agree with, or even like each other, just because we are fellow bloggers. That is also a knee-jerk reaction. We owe no duty to “support” other bloggers.

I have always objected to the use of the word “content” to describe writing. It is a usage that was probably coined by an illiterate.

I love when a post gets a lot of readers, and love getting comments. And, of course, I write in order to be read. But what I choose to blog about, or how I choose to do so is not dictated by what will get me the most readers. My favourite posts here are usually the ones that got the least comments. One thoughtful comment is worth more to me than a dozen two-word back-slaps.

I usually don’t blog about big current events, because I usually have nothing to say that hasn’t been said elsewhere. I am not interested in reading blogs that feel they must react in 1000 words or less, to current events, simply because they are current.

Sometimes we can take our personal experiences, think about them, and produce good, even great writing. Where we just write straight from heart to page without any time taken in between, we produce something fit to be read only by our therapists. I am not your therapist. Unless you take the time to write really, really well about it, I am not interested in your private life.

Likewise, if we are annoyed by some minor hassle of daily life, we can have a think about how that hassle came about, how it is connected to other things, who might be to blame and what might be done to fix things. That makes a blog post that I would like to read. Returning home and blogging about what a fucking disgrace it is, before your temper has even cooled, does not.