Alright, it's been about six months.
I suppose I should try to write something.
I've started a number of blogs and never keep up with them. I always tell myself I'm going to make a schedule and stick to it, if only for the purpose of exercising my writing and thinking skills. I think maybe I went three weeks once.
But, actually, thinking back it wasn't three weeks, in truth. I had written three weeks of material and scheduled it to be published. I don't even know how I just convinced myself that I had done that. I suppose that was a sort of selective memory.
At any rate, I am often unsuccessful at maintaining any schedule of writing. I say I'll write every week and I don't. Then I say I'll write every day, to keep less time from going by so I won't forget to do it or I'll know for sure that I did forget. Then when that doesn't work, I say I'll do it at least once every month and I forget that I even have a blog.
I think one problem that I have is writing extemporaneously with no set topic or subject. Or, either I think that's my problem, or I was looking for an excuse to use the word "extemporaneously."
A quick Google search for "blogging extemporaneously" mostly brings up various websites offering definitions of the word and what I think was a joke about David Foster Wallace. I pursued the search because I was convinced that other people must also have this problem or an issue with this. So many people interested in pursuing a writing career or writing-slash-editing positions at the very least, seemingly must have a blog if they expect to get any attention from prospective employers. And so, blogs have become just about, if not entirely, obligatory.
Part of me is tempted to say that bloggers don't have difficulty writing about anything off of the top of their head because that's seemingly what blogs are for. A very simple medium where you can just sit down, write something out, and have it published whether it's meaningful (or comprehensible) or not. So, it's a perfect medium for people who have nothing else to do but spit out their thoughts on the Internet. Or just no one else with whom to communicate.
Another part of me wants to say that bloggers don't have a problem with this because bloggers are writers, and so, very simply, they write. Not because there's no one around to listen to their crazy ramblings, but because they have things to say and they know how they want to say it.
I don't like that way of looking at it, though, since it would seem to say that I'm not a writer, considering how little I actually write and how little I would appear to have to say.
Though, I suppose, there are differing opinions on the subject. Such as these two blog posts that I found towards the top of the first page of another Google search:
Why You Shouldn't Write Often
Why You Need to Write Every Day
Even the blog post advocating writing every day suggests that you don't write in great quantity every day. It also nods towards the same sort of doubt I was just having in this article that I'm currently writing: The idea that writers just write all the time.
And so maybe the real problem (and I suppose it should've been obvious from the beginning) is not so much the volume or regularity of my writing as much as it is, very plainly, my commitment (or lack thereof) and my own weird self-perceptions. I've already more or less unwittingly discussed both of these things to some extent even in the past few hundred words or however many, and seeing it all together now it begins to seem silly that I took up this discussion at all in the first place.
But then I suppose I needed to write about something at some point.
I'll stop there, but while writing this, I was listening to Slate's Culture Gabfest, and the subject came up to some degree, so I thought I would suggest it.
Maybe I'll follow this up next week or next month. Or in six months.
