It has been a while since my last blog post. Once upon a time, I could type up a blog post per day, sometimes more. These days, the writing has become infrequent. It's not obvious why. The latest theory is that perhaps I am overthinking my blog. It has become such a chore to sit down and think of topics that merit time and effort. To be fair, it's not just blogging. It has also affected other media such as audio and video. Perhaps you are in the same situation. Today I will reflect on some things that would prevent a writer from sitting down to type up a blog post.
One likely contributor to infrequent blogging is perfectionism. It is pretentious to think that my writing has always been great. There have been good posts and bad posts, certainly. Yet when you take the work seriously, it is easy to develop a sense of perfectionism. At the beginning, it was a matter of simply writing something. The blog post would be train of thought and often unstructured. After a while it made sense to outline the blog post first to introduce some structure. This was simple. You sit down, type, check for misspellings, edit for any awkward phrases, and post.
But then it became necessary to find an image for the blog post, which introduced another task before posting. Generative AI has helped with this. No more scrolling through personal photos or image libraries.
With time, blogging started to evolve to consider SEO. It became necessary start having to think of different ways of phrasing your topic so that it would improve search engine compatibility.
As a writer, you start to look for ideas and tricks to perfect your craft. There are countless videos and websites dedicated to teaching you how to write better blog posts.
The introduction of AI didn't help. You can type up a blog post, run it through the AI to edit. At the other end, the blog post is almost entirely rewritten. It says the same thing, but not the way you originally wrote it. Not in your own words.
In short, the effort to write a blog post becomes an entire production process with drafts, edits, and optimizations. What once started as a therapeutic way to express yourself has evolved into a day of work. It becomes a drive to write the perfect blog post.
If you're writing professionally, then all of this makes sense. But, if you are writing to simply express yourself and possibly have discussions with commentors, then is all of that necessary? Most readers are forgiving of a misspelled word here or there. And with the volume of blog posts on the Internet, how likely is it that yours will be the perfect blog post?
One simple thing that contributes to writing less is falling out of the habit of writing. In some regards writing is like smoking cigarettes, drinking some beers daily, or going out for a jog in the mornings. They are habits. They become a part of you. But you can choose to break habits, or life can force you to change habits. Then you no longer have the habit. Writing takes time. When your time is limited, you may skip sitting down to write a day. Then two days. Before you know it a week has passed, or longer.
I can tell you that one thing that occupies a great deal of time that I could have spent blogging has been the consumption of social media and watching YouTube. Rather than putting things out, I'm consuming. What time I would have spent writing gets eaten up by social media and other content. This has crowded out what time I would have spent writing. One habit replaces another.
Something else that can affect my writing, and perhaps yours, is getting rewarded for your work. It is possible, on a traditional blog, to put in some ads and generate revenue. If your blog gains any traction, then you can earn from page views, indefinitely. On a blockchain or Web3 platform, you earn rewards from curation. The more likes you get, the more your rewards are.
Ad revenue is not as harsh. Your work earns based on the total exposure of your individual post and your blog as a whole. You can have metrics to find out which blog posts earned the most and then start writing more about that thing. It's not long before your blog writing is no longer about the things that inspire you, they become a target that you write about continuously.
On Web3, particularly Hive, you only have 7 days to earn rewards. Obviously, to earn the most rewards, you will tend to write about the things that generate the most rewards.
The problem with shaping your writing to fit a niche that is highly rewarded is that at some point you will have written everything you know about the topic. It becomes increasingly difficult to write something fresh about it. You get bored with it.
Writing for rewards leads me to the other thought. You're making your blog posts into a business. Anybody with a hobby that has turned into a business will tell you that it starts to take the joy out of the hobby. What you once did just for fun becomes a grind. Then it diminishes your love of it.
On the other hand, they say that if you do what you love, then you'll never work a day in your life. This is great when you can find something that you can do when you want and for as long as you want. If you can find a way to get paid for doing what you love without losing passion for it, then you are fortunate.
For many, a hobby is an escape from having done things they don't want to do to earn money. When that hobby then becomes a job, there is the risk that the passion for the hobby will evaporate.
Perhaps age also contributes to a reduction in writing. Like with focusing on niche, years of blogging can leave you feeling like you've written about everything. Like you have nothing left to say. I don't necessarily believe this is true as there are plenty of authors who have become successful at an advanced age. But blogging is not exactly the same as writing books for publication. And there are plenty of older writers on Hive who share their experiences and thoughts.
Writer's block is a bit controversial. Some writers will tell you it's very real. Others will tell you that the best cure for writer's block is to write. So long as you continue writing, an idea will eventually come. But if your pen suffers constipation, it gets more difficult to write the longer you go without it.
From some of the books I have read on the topic, going for a walk or having new experiences will often result in an idea for a new post. Sitting around thinking up ideas is not the best way to have ideas. They often come in tangential experiences.
Something that can contribute to not writing is not having clarity on your audience. When you've gone down the track of writing for rewards, you often have a particular audience in mind. But, if you are like me, you would have begun blogging for the sake of blogging. My audience was me and people like me.
Once you start shaping your writing to a specific audience, you end up with ideas for blog posts that don't fit that target audience. So you don't write.
Things aren't going to get better. Google has changed their algorithm to consider authority. If you write about a topic consistently, you become authoritative on that topic, which boosts your search ranking. This makes writing about anything and everything that interests you a bad decision as it reduces your authority on any one subject. But this goes back to writing for rewards. If you're simply writing as a craft. perhaps the rewards and target audiences don't matter all that much.
When it comes down to it, I've overcomplicated my writing experience. I've grown accustomed to one-take writing over the years. And it seems like I have lately started putting too much thought into the other parts of writing blog posts that have nothing to do with self-expression. I think I have fallen into the trap of making my blog a business, which has resulted in limiting the topics that I write about. I have handcuffed myself from exploring ideas and topics that don't fit into "my brand". The result is that many topics go unexplored or discarded. Trying to fit a mold is what largely prevents me from sitting down to write blog posts. And I must admit that social media steals much of my time as well. I need to cut back on that.
I hope that this self-reflective post has given you some things to consider in your writing experience. The reality is that most of us on Hive are unlikely to change the world. We don't need the pressure of making our blog posts into a business. This is something we do to make friends and connect with other people with similar experiences. Blogging is a way of sharing your humanity with others. With that in mind, don't take it too seriously, to the point where it stifles you.
