One aspect
of blogging that I have really come to appreciate is the obligation to
repeatedly re-read my own writing. I’m not really a spur-of-the-moment blogger:
each entry usually undergoes an extended notebook-to-electronic document
transferral process (or once a back-of-till-receipt-to-notebook-to-electronic
document process, as described in First Entry) that entails much re-reading and
editing. Furthermore, before starting (or re-starting), I have usually let a
few entries accumulate before actually posting anything online, to be sure that
it was really worth (re)starting anything, enforcing even more re-reading
before publication.
Even once
posts have made it online, I have been known to re-read them. Sounds crazy,
when I think of how time to read anything - be it for professional or
personal development, intellectual pleasure or pure entertainment – is at such
a premium, and that there are so many more useful, interesting and well-written
things I could be spending my almost non-existent reading time reading. And
yet, usually during tram journeys, when I am simply too tired, after a rough
night or a working day, to contemplate exploiting my commuting time in any
vaguely productive fashion, and when the possibilities of Facebook and its
hyperlinked off-shoots have been exhausted, I have occasionally been known to
waste precious subscription 3G megabytes on reading my own blog via my tiny,
eye-strain-inducing Smartphone screen. This can even lead to further
post-publication tweaking and adjustments. It could seem rather narcissistic
and egotistical to spend such time reading my own writing, but to look at it
another way, if I can’t be bothered to read my blog, how can I expect anyone
else to do so?
My point
is, I have learned a lot about my writing style this way. I see that I overuse
hyphens and colons, and regularly have problems with awkward, over-long
sentences. My comma technique could definitely be improved. Blogging cannot
really be used to rehearse and refine the formal, academic style that is
necessary in my professional life, but writing in such a different context has
served to raise my awareness of such style issues.
I
occasionally also return to some of my much earlier writings. I couldn’t say
when the “need to write” explained in my first blog entry kicked in. As a child
I was a committed diary keeper – although for these I have not yet braved a
re-read, in fact I’d probably struggle even to find them. I don’t remember at
precisely what age I started keeping separate note-books for fragments of ideas
for poems, song lyrics, essays, even some loftily-named “philosophies”, but
most of it dates from the most intellectually-stimulated, emotionally-charged
and narcissistically self-absorbed period of my life – namely late teenage-hood
and early university days, before the tyranny of the everyday really began to
take over. Very little of my material has been read by anyone except me, not
even my nearest and dearest, although I did allow (persuade? coerce?) two
female housemates, on two separate occasions, to read some printouts. I
remember that one declared my writing to be ‘rather moving’; the other declared
me to be completely bonkers. Any aspirations I could have possibly had of
becoming a published writer were effectively felled at the first submission I
ever attempted: two of my poems were rejected by an amateur poetry magazine
which, I distinctly recall, had a stated editorial policy of publishing everything.
Some of
this stuff is lost to me forever due to my appalling handwriting. Other
examples are now frozen in time capsules of un-updatable software programmes.
But some of it has survived the ravages of time and technology, follows me
around via my paranoid data-backing-up process, and very, very occasionally
still sees the light of day. None of it is any good. I will try to resist the
temptation to post any of my archaeological finds here, although I suspect I
will give in, because they make pretty much pre-written blog entries, and some
of it is not entirely irrelevant to the extremely vague thematic of this blog.
Then as now, I was fearful and muddled: then, as now, I wondered, worried and
generally wasted words.
