An interesting observation by a now-ex-blogger

This one quotation from Sarah's article just jumped out at me.

Link: Why I shut down my blog. By Sarah Hepola.

One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I'd been reading, and shut down my blog. I had kept the blog for nearly five years, using it as a repository for personal anecdotes, travelogues, and the occasional flight of fiction—all of which I hoped, eventually, might lead to a novel. And then, somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn't helping me write; it was keeping me from it.

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[What she writes here below... I remember feeling EXACTLY this when forced to crank crap forgettable articles for newspapers, either the stress from constantly meeting new people and feeling shy while at the same time having to commodify them, or the personal humilation at knowing I was just dumping my interview stories into a rote formula. That was in the 1980s, though, so I went into an MFA program in creative writing instead, to learn to write for myself and my own standards again. And now, many many years later, blogs have taken me past the creativity-cramping I used to feel after some of my poems got published in good literary magazines, the fear of writing a poem that was pure crap. Blogs are works in progress, and publications. They're a dessert topping AND a floor wax. Can't beat that.]

Just prior to that, I'd been writing for an alt-weekly in Austin, Texas. What began as a great job had curdled into an anxiety nightmare. I would burn to write a certain profile and then, deadline looming, I would stare at the computer as another beautiful Saturday ticked away. I can remember crossing the street one night and thinking, absently, "If I got run over by a car, I wouldn't have to finish that story!" Don't get me wrong—I didn't want to die. I just wanted a really long extension. Thus my decision to leave the job. Thus my journey to the southern hemisphere. Thus the blog that I started, thinking no one would read it and secretly hoping they would. The blog was the perfect bluff for a self-conscious writer like me who yearned for the spotlight and then squinted in its glare. [...]

Eventually, I began enjoying my writing again. I stopped worrying about deadlines, audience, editors, letters to the editor, all the stuff that had smothered me before. I was writing so fast that I didn't have time to double-think my sentence structure or my opinions. What came out was sloppier but also funnier and more honest. I started getting e-mails from people I'd never met, and they were actually encouraging.

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OK, now here's the bit that's my favorite quotation. Maybe I'll put this line up in the banner rotation on my blog. If it isn't too long.

At times, I started to feel that jokes and scenarios and turns of phrase were my capital, and that my capital was limited, and each blog entry was scattering more of it to the wind, pissing away precious dollars and cents in the form of punch lines I could never use again, not without feeling like a hack. You know: "How sad. She stole that line from her own blog."

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[Isn't that cool? And it's just SO true. I've also felt that way about some rants I've written to a listserv I manage. I never know what's going to bite me in  the butt, or when the stars will line up and the universe or the tenth muse is going to speak through me, so stuff comes out that wouldn't otherwise. I have to appreciate that. But if that's the ONLY place where the universe is channeled through my writing, then I'm pissing away my best ideas too.

It did help a lot when I was writing my dissertation, to be active in private listserv discussions in the Xenaverse, the fandom community I was studying. Invaluable, actually, and I owe those people so much for being a sounding board, and for arguing with me when I got it wrong. Sometimes, now, when I read my dissertation, I wonder who wrote it, because I do feel that the tenth muse, or at least Xena and Gabrielle, were using me for a channel. Doesn't feel like I wrote it at all, and on really good days, I swear the dissertation wrote itself. I don't know too many harried and harassed grad students who can say that about the process, but it was one of the best times of my life.

There's one more bit that the writer has here that I thought was a particularly pithy observation:]

I suspect I'll come back to blogging eventually. It will be something I quit on occasion, like whiskey and melted cheese, when the negative effects outweigh the benefits. Practically every blogger I know has taken their site down at some point—for personal reasons, for business reasons, for boredom reasons. It's no different from the way we have to turn off our cell phones or stop checking e-mail so that we can actually focus on something. As much as I loved writing online, it's a relief writing offline: taking time to let a story unspool, to massage a sentence over an afternoon's walk, to stew for days—weeks, even—on a plot line. What a modern luxury. Now, if I could just turn off the TV, I think I could finally get started.

I've been there and done that, and yes, it most certainly did feel very good. I really started blogging in earnest with Radio Userland in early 2002, and the blog I was posting to at that time (nameless here forevermore) rose up respectably in the blogosphere, and in the mostly tech-blog atmosphere of that time, got linked to by the A-listers of the day, which satisfied me but wasn't the be-all and end-all of my existence, having gone through that previous newspaper experience that drove me into the Arkansas MFA program. Regardless of who linked to me, I was really still writing for myself.

So by early 2003, and for certain by the start of the Iraq War, I was immersed in war coverage at work, putting in a lot of overtime, worrying about some war-bloggers in Iraq who are my friends, and I just needed some time off. I went inward, started learning the I Ching, and filled four handwritten journals in six months. Felt real good. And then I started blogging again. That felt good too. It's called "being your own boss."