I feel a somewhat guilty/worrisome about starting a blog. There are plenty of informed (and uninformed) opinions already out there, who needs another? What can I possibly write that others have not expressed more eloquently? Am I contributing to the inevitable rise of such quaint, if modernized, saying like “you know… if you google two philosophers, you’ll get three blogs”? Should I stop before I start?
No. I’m gonna do it anyway. I’m not writing this blog as an advertising vehicle for whatever I believe might be true/false/interesting/curious about early modern philosophy, but as a bit of behavioral therapy. You see, writing is painful to me. I’ve never really digested the concept of “a draft”, and so I worry incessantly about individual words and formatting options, I imagine too many possible readers and their angry/dismissive reaction. I insist that I know my song well before I start singing. Surely, unless you are a genius wordsmith, this is a recipe for disaster (disaster = blank page).
So by way of therapy, I’m gonna write a blog and force myself to express half-baked ideas in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps if I do this often enough, writing will become easier for me. That, if you were wondering, is the plan.
Oh, and thanks for reading, dear therapists.
2 comments:
What, no shameless self-promotion? Clearly you do not understand the blogosphere.
I hope the internets help you to write more easily. In my own case, though, blogging has not so much helped with the problems you mentioned -- I have plenty of unposted draft entries sitting on my hard drive that I cannot get just right -- though it has made me (I think and hope) a little better at getting to the nub of the matter more quickly. The brevity of the post, combined with the desire to spark the tiniest interest in your reader, has helped me a lot.
Interesting. Like you, my inclination to edit may get the best of me in the end, that's for sure. Of course, having a whole bunch of draft ideas sitting around can also be usuful...
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