Some bloggers have a regular schedule for posting and forcing themselves to meet the deadlines. In essence, something like “updates every Thursday.”
For me, I think this is a bad idea, because it forces me to write. If my day is boring and uneventful as it quite often is and I still have to crank out a post, it would not be a post that readers would enjoy. Better once-a-month enthusiastic, interesting posts then an ugly stream of tedious drudgery for the visitor to wade through every time, stuff like (quoting one random ancient post):
Yay! I got 40.
Well thatz gonna have to wait. No it doesn’t. Yes it does.
Humanities, approx. 10:13
Mr. C gave out our tests. I got a 40/40, a perfect! Not
ONE
single mistake! Oh joy! I secured a 20% out of my daring 98%.We reviewed it.
A schedule also makes writing a responsibility, which I feel takes away all the fun and enjoyment. From the three hiatuses documented on the about page or looking at any post before March 2010 (by the way, please don’t (I have a feeling this will make more people actually do so via reverse psychology but I don’t even know if I’m not subconsciously secretly enjoying the idea, so anyway)), you can see the result. Pages and pages and pages of documenting my life as if I were an endangered specimen in a zoo. Now I can kind of appreciate it as reminding me of what I was like only two years ago, how differently I saw the world and how I loved hyperbole… but I don’t think anybody else would read it for the content.
Aside: come to think of it, I don’t really see myself as a generally hyperbolic person, even though rationally thinking, it does seem like I do this ALL THE TIME. See what I did there? Sometimes when I’m reading my own posts from a while back I have trouble comprehending that they were written by the same person.
It might also clash with other priorities… as a student, my schedule isn’t packed, but it wouldn’t be easy to fit one more regular hobby into it. And my posts might be rushed, rough around the edges with missing anecdotes, confusing flow, and stupid typos. Knowing how perfectionist I am, maybe I should just accept this and hit the Publish button sooner, but I think a little polishing is definitely necessary.
Of course, maybe I struggle with the idea of regularly scheduled posts because I’m not good enough at writing, at observing the world, at deriving a life lesson from every scrap of overheard conversation, or transforming every small event into a hilarious and thought-provoking narrative, or distilling the magical poetic essence out of every scene of rain and sun and sticking in a metaphor about perseverance. So yes, I’m sure there are bloggers who can do one or all of the above and who can regularly create awesome walls of text. I’m not one of them. (Yet.)
And of course there is an advantage to this schedule, and it can be phrased in the same way to sound cool and stress my point: it forces me to write. I’ll get better at writing, get more ideas out of my brain and onto the blog for other people and my future self to think about, sometimes not even ideas I consciously realized I had before I started writing the post. I’ll get closer to reaching blogging nirvana, having a post idea for every occasion, and my schedule will become sustainable with meaningful posts only.
Unfortunately, writing is not extremely high on my list of priorities, so I guess that’s not going to happen.
I wonder though. Once upon a time I wrote fiction too, when we had writing assignments that weren’t all about analyzing ourselves or important characters in the plot of a book or something. There’s a little bit of yearning for that in me still. But I have only one life to use on these things…