Unapologetic Imperfection

“You did not start blogging to blog about blogging,” suggests Laura. She later adds, “This kind of navel-gazing blogging-about-blogging writing is self-help flavored to me, and self-help writing is so scammy and unpleasant.” For me, this depends upon what kind of meta-blogging is happening.

It’s no secret that for sure I think that content marketing sucks with its meta-blogging that’s never about much more than juicing your SEO, and other such nonsense that threatened to kill the blogging form—but obviously I’ve also written countless posts over twenty-five years where I’ve engaged with other bloggers about blogging.

Precisely because blogging is democratized publishing, I often find the ways in which other bloggers talk about their writing to be interesting. At the same time, I’d likely side with Laura on the issue of posts about how to motivate yourself to write, or which argue there is something inherently “moral or positive” to writing every day.

To be fair, though, that sort of meta-blogging mostly doesn’t interest me because it’s not relevant to how I blog. Other kinds of thinking about the form, however, I do frequently find valuable.

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You guessed right: it’s once again time here on the blog for some meta-blogging.

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Leon:

This way of thinking and writing suits blogging in the sense of publishing chronologically, rather than “tending” a digital garden of more considered articles that represent your complete thoughts on a range of subjects. I can write these sorts of posts, often in the form of how-tos, but I find it difficult and quite boring.

[…]

However, while chronological blogging allows me to write more stuff in less restrictive ways, I am aware that I can repeat myself quite a lot.

Robert:

That’s probably why I hardly remember what I’ve written in the past. I’m sure my blog archive contains posts that are more or less duplicates. I simply don’t remember.

I don’t see it as a drawback or an advantage. It’s just how I work, and I don’t see a reason to change it. Honestly, I don’t think it would be possible even if I wanted to.

I’m not sure if somehow Leon and Robert meant to be in conversation with each other here. Sometimes as I’m taking note of others’ biog posts this sort of synchronicity just sort of happens, which I suppose is the nature of synchronicity.

I’ve talked before about how my brain tends more naturally toward narrative thinking than database thinking, and it might seem contradictory for me to say that blogging post after post after post over time is more narrative for me than maintaining a topical page on a digital garden would be, but for me it’s literally that the process of “post after post after post over time” itself forms part of the cognitive narrative of my own thinking.

Each and every bit of it needs to exist, each bit of thinking as it was at its own time still there for the reading. Updating or rewriting this or that topical page just wouldn’t fit the way my brain works.

(This is beside the point, but I had to laugh at Robert mentioning he got the People and Blogs questions from Manu “weeks in advance”. Every blogger Manu interviews gets the same questions; they’ve been out there for more than two years.)

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Kami:

Because having intent shows that you care, and showing that you care makes you vulnerable, and being vulnerable means getting hurt. Because art is a product now. And anything that isn't polished, isn't perfectly acceptable, is derided.

Suliman:

The value lies in the process, never the final product. I like reading your thoughts as they develop, the ones you write at 4 am after a sleepless night and a busy mind not a possibly correct and mature opinion generated in two seconds by what Sam Altman and his henchmen stole from us with investor money and government backing. Be unapologetically you, it’s worth it!

Kami and Suliman presumably are only coincidentally in conversation with each other here, just as likely were Leon and Robert, but once again it’s always interesting to see these unwitting echoes.

I’m especially struck by the power of Kami elsewhere in the post arguing, “The prompt you write will always be more interesting than the image it generates.” I feel like it perhaps deserves repeating its own.

“The prompt you write will always be more interesting than the image it generates.”

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It’s worth noting that the ways in which Leon, Robert, Kami, and Suliman are talking about writing can be viewed as orbiting the idea that any given post a blogger writes itself also is a kind of prompt for some future blog post they will write—or, indeed, some other blogger will write. Leon has talked about “collective blogging”, and while it’s not what he means, I find this sort of almost serendipitous and mutual prompting to be collective blogging of the kind that actually defines the term blogosphere.

“Your unpolished words are more interesting than any ‘perfect’ post,” urges Robert. “Share them while they’re still alive.”

It’s true, if I take Robert’s post as a whole, that I simply cannot “publish, not polish”. Words mean things, and I mean my words to mean particular things and in specific ways, and so I need to do what I can to make sure they mean those things. That said, I don’t typically have drafts lying around. Laura’s approach of banking several blog posts at once to roll out over time mostly is pretty is foreign to me.

It’s also, however, rare that I just dash something off. That, for me, is what social media is for, and is why on both Bluesky and Mastodon I try to keep only fourteen days of posts around at any given time. That’s where I just dash off a thought or two, or several, or a multitude. Then, like a conversation in person, they dissipate into the ether.

Here, though, writing comes in sessions, for lack of a better term for it. I do, in fact, edit, add, and remove things—both as I go and after getting to what I think is the end. So: I do take my time, and I do care about how I say what I have to say. I don’t need to post perfection, but I do need to do more than “just publish”. Polishing is part of how I write.

Robert is right, though. We might not all agree where the lines are, but what separates us from the content marketers is that we share our words while they’re still alive, and then leave them there as part of a living document, because we ourselves are living documents.

We are all unfinished and none of us are perfect, and that’s precisely what I find so powerful about blogging.