A metablog - blogging about blogging

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.