Written with: iPad Mini (6th gen) | Apple Pencil | Notes | iPadOS 15
This is my first time sitting down and starting a text document with the specific intention of "blogging". I've thought about it for a while - devoted a lot of time and brainpower to its actually - without actually writing a word. This is typical of me. There are a lot of reasons for it, some external, some internal. Whether it's a matter of undiagnosed issues affecting my executive functioning or just an issue of personal work ethic... That can wait for another post.
For now I'd rather take a positive approach, thinking not about what l lack, or what obstacles I'm dealing with, but about what I hope to achieve. I made a silly throwaway tweet recently, along the lines of “I’m slowly shifting from microblogger brain to blogger brain”, which in all honesty sums it up. Maybe I hope that by sharing the sentiment via both the hellish platforms of contemporary social media and the old world of longer-form blog posts, I hope to exorcise those demons, or at least commit to taking steps in a longer detox.
Anyway, writing longer form things -- short stories, scripts, or even posts such as these -- has been a struggle for me for a very long time. Not the actual writing process itself; it has its challenges obviously, but I quite enjoy it when I'm immersed in it. It's always been an issue of actually starting the process. I think part of the issue has been, for a long time, that I've convinced myself that it's only worth writing if it amounts to a large, significant, worthwhile project. Not only does the size of such a project intimidate me, especially as it needs (so it seemed to me) planning and forethought before the process of writing even begins, but also because most of the time I simply don't feel like doing that kind of writing.
Social media has twofold appeal to my dreadful brain. One form is probably more well known: instant engagement, short term rewards, the instant gratification of a like, a reply, the miracle of digital technology and the internet allowing for your typewriter to talk back to you. I've been well aware of that for a long time, but knowing that social media is a saccharine poison didn't do much to improve my habits.
What I realised more recently is that it isn't just the rewards of writing which are different in microblogging, but the type of writing one tends to do. This may seem obvious, but that obviousness is itself part of the problem. Let me explain. A tweet can be about anything. The bar is incredibly low. Nobody expects a tweet to win a Pulitzer, let alone to even be coherent. Not only does this combine with the instant gratification of likes and other engagement to de intoxicatingly appealing; it is also incredibly freeing. The words, as stupid and inane as they are, flow freely. This doesn't equate to literary qualify, and in my experience has little benefit to the actual qualify of one's writing. perhaps it does make some limited difference, and I'm aware that it can be used as a platform for microfiction, but that's not my focus here.
Ironically, the constraints of Twitter and other microblogging platforms (and, I should say, social media in general), help make it easier to motivate yourself to use it. When the platform is less capable of rendering a masterpiece, there is no expectation to make a masterpiece on it. As a result, although there's less that you could write, there's no pressure upon you which insists that you should write anything of any level of quality. When there is no constraint on what you should write, it's so much easier to sit down and write, even if (in fact, because) you can't hope to achieve much.
What I finally, slowly realised was that this mindset isn't exclusive to social media. it is possible, through deliberate effort, to break down your existing mindset which constrains your motivation to write. It's a matter of telling yourself that it's okay to write total garbage; partly because this can be a necessary step towards writing anything at all, and partly because there is a lot to learn from writing something that sucks — as long as you're not creating it under the unproductive conditions of social media.
In any craft, you learn from doing. Any visual artist worth their salt has thousands of sketches no one will ever see, and the same is true of writers. I've been slowly doing just that - writing short "sketches" without a goal or audience in mind - more and more often over the past few years gradually climbing out of a pit of total creative inactivity that frustrated and embarrassed me. However, I still find it very hard to fit writing into my daily life; even when I have the time, the motivation rarely comes. Despite that, as l often chide myself, I find plenty of time to post whatever inane bullshit comes to mind on social media. But the chiding didn't get me anywhere. Wouldn't it be better to think about what draws me to idly posting, and work a form of writing into my schedule which meets those needs?
There are a lot of other reasons I turned to blogging, which I will probably share in seperate posts, although I'm sure they're not unique. They have to do with the structure and design of the modern internet, as well as the changing ways humans have expressed themselves from early modernism into today. But the fact it feels this satisfying to redirect my posting energy to something a little more "complete" is really promising!