… is writing. As soon as you have to write something, you have to think about it, which means you start to elaborate on ideas, edit wording and punctuation (away from how you spontaneously expressed yourself), and add cruft.
The other problem is that I started adding titles to these posts, and now I think I have to do it for everything. Twitter a) doesn’t have titles and b) had a character limit that makes it much easier to just throw an idea out there (though before the limit was bumped from 140 to 280, a lot of editing was still required to make thoughts fit in a small space).
As a demonstration of the above statement, my original plan for this post was to have no title, and simply be the sentences “The problem with microblogging is writing. As soon as you have to write something, you have to think about it.”
Then I realised I should explain myself, so I added “which means you start to elaborate on ideas, and add cruft”. (I imagine that truly thinking about writing would involve also editing your work, to distil it down to something readable instead of just being a stream of consciousness - but the aim of this (micro)blog is to allow it to be spontaneous).
I started on the second paragraph as an admission that part of the problem was self-inflicted (the titles) - you see that I’m already compromising my thought to imagined critiques (“Microblogs don’t have titles” or something), which is a common symptom of having to think about the things I’m expressing. In the process of writing the first sentence of that paragraph, it read a little breathlessly, so I put in the comma.
That act alone made me go back to the first paragraph, and add “edit wording and punctuation away from how you spontaneously expressed yourself”. Writing this coda now, I realised that’s a bit too long to be an element in an otherwise snappy list, so I added the brackets.
(While writing this now, I had a little English teacher in my head critique my retelling of this story of being a lot of “I did this… and then I did this… and then… and then…”; I’ve been consciously messing with how I write the beginnings of the paragraphs in this coda to placate her)
(Of course this imagined teacher in my head is a woman - all the English teachers I had in secondary school were)
Then I went back to the second paragraph and added the bit about Twitter since I felt like using it and similar services did allow me to be more spontaneous, and it also helps prove my point as the two problems I describe here were mitigated by the design/implementation of Twitter.
The reason I care so much about this is because I want to have a place where I can note down little things that occur to me - insofar as I’m comfortable sharing them under my own name - that feels like it’s owned by me. Self-ownership rules out social media. (Yes, I realise that it’s not really “self-ownership” if the pages are rendered and hosted by GitHub, but at least I’ve got a copy of the repo on my personal machine in case GitHub ever goes down)
An obvious answer to this desire is to keep a diary, but in my experience doing so is “stressful” because I feel like I’m not doing it right if I don’t write in the diary regularly. I start and stop with projects all the time, and it hurts to pick up a diary/journal and read something I wrote months or years ago, with reams of blank pages after it. In my mind, for some reason it is more “acceptable” to infrequently update a blog than a diary.
Another part of it is spontaneity. I have a thought and think “oh, this would be nice to jot down somewhere”. A blog works better for me since I’m almost always on the computer but my desk is otherwise cluttered by lots of other shit. I can’t be bothered to put a diary in a regular place to retrieve it, write something down, then put it back. However, any act of writing, apparently for me, is not conducive to simply “jotting something down”. I glanced at the clock when I started writing this - it was 11:13 p.m.. Now it’s 11:54.
There’s also the fact that I have a conflicting desire to want to share my thoughts with people but an intense fear/hatred of self-promotion (or perhaps the fear of apathy from others after working hard on something). Self-publishing on my own personal website indulges both that desire and hatred: someone may stumble upon it if they click on my GitHub profile or whatever, but otherwise no-one’s going to read it but me (and I don’t plan on sharing links to these posts with anyone - for now, at least).
I’m going to just have to keep working on it (i.e. spontaneity and terseness/conciseness) (the first parenthetical added after I realised “keep working on it” was vague without a definition of what “it” means, and this one after I realised that I just keep fucking writing when I wanted to express something pithy)