Saturday, January 15, 2011

Fresh Look, Fresh Writing

What is it about blogging that is so inherently difficult for me to get a handle on?  I never really take the time to do it, which might be part of the problem, but I think there's something interesting to be said about the fact that I have more draft posts than published ones hanging out on my dashboard.  It's like a written identity crisis.  In order to identify why I can't seem to keep up on posting to save my life, I've complied a list of reasons that I think I have a hard time blogging.

1.  I find most bloggers obnoxious at best.
There is nothing more annoying to me than people who post thinking that other people care about their mindless crappy drivel that they think passes as "real blogging."  They aren't funny, they aren't posting anything of interest, and most of the time they can't even be bothered with proper punctuation or spelling.  For fear of being numbered among their masses, I keep not posting.

2.  Humor niche bloggers are often not as funny as they think they are.  Some are downright pretentious.
Case in point:  Allie from Hyperbole and a Half
Pretentious case in point:  the "pirate" named Maddox
I don't need to say anything else here.

3.  Mommy bloggers, food bloggers, fashion bloggers, etc. are boring.
I don't care about your kids or the "hilarious" things they do.  Unless you're creating your own recipes or writing actually helpful hints and not "lol, I made this, and I messed it up like this so next time I'll try this" garbage, your blog is lame and only your mother reads it.  Because she has to.  As for your "truly insightful" comments about the world of fashion... go die in a fire; no one will notice.

4.  Developing a voice is hard and I'm not all that inclined to do it.
I will say that the two examples are cited because their biggest flaw is that they're not really that funny; they have, however, developed their blogging voices to be really quite good in other ways.  I realize that part of blogging is about developing one's own voice, but I'm not sure that I'm ready to commit to one specific way of writing, even for the extent of an entire post.  My writing style suffers from multiple personality disorder, and I'm not really sure that I want to force it to pick a single voice.

5.  Who actually reads this garbage anyway?
I can't say that I think there will be all that may people reading what I'm writing.  That being said, I don't see a reason to post regularly.  I suppose it's a good exercise in writing or whatever, but I'm not sure that "blog-style writing" will really be of any help as far as eventually getting published.

6.  I'm lazy.
There, I said it.  I don't like to finish posts because it takes more time than I feel like devoting to it.

So that's the list.  And you know what?  Screw it.  I'll probably fall into one of these categories more than once.  I'm ok with it.  Blogging is good for me.

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