This is a question I ask myself frequently. I have a history of being all too ready to tell people what I think. I still do that too much though, I really should have learned by now. We're not 16 anymore, are we? If you're writing a blog, it's also a question you had better be able to answer. Now, was that said like a true bore?
Winston Churchill once said, "If you would be remembered, do something worth writing about or write something worth reading." I am not particularly concerned with "being remembered" as per WC(I always think of Ozymandias when people start talking about immortality)but if we're going to write anything, even a blog post, shouldn't it be worth reading? That's a rhetorical question and the correct answer is "Yes."
In touring the blogiverse, linking usually from a blog I like to one that has been recommended by that writer, I have been surprised at the amount of good writing that is out there, for free, being written by people who are not getting paid to write it. (See e.g., the blog roll on the right). I seem to gravitate to people who write well and amusingly and who take good pictures. The medium of the blog seems to lend itself best to that kind of thing. A few are a little more serious. Some are a little clubby. None are bores. I know I have a capacity to be a bore - and not a small one. I need to keep my "who cares" filter running. It's on now and I have just barely squeezed through. So, I'll shut up now.
4 comments:
because of that stupid filter, i end up going weeks/months without posting. i gotta figure out how to adjust the levels.
That is a good point and I do try and be aware of that too. I have a pad of paper where I waffle on endlessly, then I read it a few hours (or days) later to see if there is anything worth reading among all that tedious nonsense. A filter - and gets the gripes out of my system
Ya gotta remember, Shelley remembered Ozymandius. That's more reference than most of us will garner a thousand years from now.
Cheers.
Hey all - thanks for stopping by. At the risk of getting clubby myself :-) all those whose blogs I read (ahem, including you all) are, in my view, diamonds that I have raked from the general internet rubbish. None of _you_ need to be told that editing yourself is necessary.
R- Remember, who was it? Dorothy Parker, advising writers to "kill their little darlings"? One lies bleeding here next to my wing chair. In an earlier draft of this post (which is still pretty clunky) I wrote about how my high school biology teacher once explained that if the history of the planet were the length of a football field, modern humans would have emerged an inch or two before the goal line. In other words, a thousand years, depending on your frame of reference, is nothing. There. A little darling resurrected, sort of. Maybe a moribund darling.
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