Are you familiar with regular expressions?
If no: they are sequences of characters, usually short, that greatly simplify searching a text within a text. For example, a sequence \d\.\d is a regular expression that facilitates finding two digits with a dot between them, like 1.2 or 0.0. It is used by many applications, e.g., by LibreOffice Writer. (Of course, regular expressions used in the wild are far more complex.)
Now, you're familiar, so – some background. Sometimes I try to multitask on my computer (like a processor, but I succeed far less often; by the way: concurrency is not parallelism). Some time before starting to write this article, I had launched a script to search some text within some file, and then write this text to a new file. It's running so slowly… second after second… the size of the new file is increasing 1MB after 1MB… (The input file's size is over 600MB.)
(I surely will have to stop it when I will be shutting down my computer, and find a better way for that searching.)
I can observe a similar behavior when I want to write a blog post. I've had several attempts in the past (how it sounds ;) ) – I've failed more often than not. When I try to write, I feel that the content advances so slowly that now I just reject the idea of an article even before starting to write.
Of course, that needs not to be true – it may only seem to me. In a commonsensical way, I would have to verify this feeling to be sure. But I don't see any way of doing that, so I must take for granted that things are as they are. What's the root cause then? (In this paragraph, there would be described the chain of causes that lead to the root cause, but I'm omitting it for the brevity of the flow of my thoughts.)
First and foremost, simply or not, I usually want to do it too well. I imagine an article always being too good. All the information must be verified; all difficult terms needs an inline explanation – or at least a link to Wikipedia; and, the article must include a list of all the sources I used to write it (well, even for one-liners…).
Just have a look at an article on my previous-but-still-not-abandoned blog: https://silvuss.github.io/2019/03/23/the-structure-of-the-linux-filesystem.html. Now – looks nice, but the process of writing it was just too long.
Secondly, I expect my articles to have a well-defined main topic. This means that starting from one topic, moving through another one to a third one – no good. A topic is a topic, not multiple ones.
Thirdly, I expect my articles to flow logically, similarly to expectations for a paper in a college:
(…) in college, it’s harder to get an A if you wait until the last minute. Professors aren’t as lenient about poor writing, and they expect papers to flow logically.
The introduction, the middle part, the end. I admit, that's how things should go in a good paper – and in a good article… But I have a problem, and it needs some solution!
The above is not a complete list of my expectations, but I don't want to list them all, in order not to be trapped in the too-detailed-article case.
I see a couple of solutions. In this article, however, I will mention two of the most useful… again, in order not to be trapped in the too-detailed-article case.
The first solution is general and related to a writer's block. One advice from PaperRater seems to fit:
The first step to deal with this issue [a writer's block] is to do some research!
Translating into the language of blogging, I need to read, read, and – probably – read one article (or book) more. I do it already, and it's one of the reasons I've created this blog for: too much information.
The second one is more specific and related to the flow of my writing. It should always be logical, as I mentioned. That's out of the question. But, does it need to have one, well-defined topic?
(By the way, is the flow of this article easy to understand? That's how my thoughts go.)
I want to implement both of the above advices. But it's hard. But I've started it establishing this blog, and I continue it writing this article.
Will I succeed? Time will tell (in Polish, we say czas pokaże, literally 'time will show').
