(You have to read this. It's all for you.)
Dear Reader,
Hello.
Welcome to my blog. My weblog. My...autoblography, if you like.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t like, and I don’t mind if you don’t like.
I do like.
Live and let live, as they say.
You are probably a blogger yourself. We are legion, aren’t we? So very many people, so much webspace...so little time. It’s enough to daunt you, isn’t it?
No?
It scares the hell out of me.
Blogging’s weird, isn’t it? We all started through a spark of interest, and look where it’s taken us. Look where we all are. We’re the blogging planet.
I started because I was curious about the whole idea of a weblog, and (regulars, hello) thought it might be a good place to jot down thoughts and whatnot, with the added bonus that the whole world could see it; theoretically.
I blogged rarely in the beginning...less than once a fortnight, for a while. I blogged only if I was online (which was rare), only if there was something interesting to say (rarer), and when those two occasions collided, on top of that, I had to remember I had a blog in the first place...
Things have changed!
To begin with I had no comments, no sitemeter, no links, no site design...nothing. Just a blog-standard template from the free selection at Blogger.com, and my words. Because I had no idea how many (or how few) people read my blog, ignorance, was, in a way, bliss. I wasn’t aware, then, that there were so many blogs. At this point in time there was one heck of a ruckus kicking back and forth across the blogosphere about the Guardian’s temerity to run a ‘Best British Weblog’ competition. How could they be so crass as to assess the relative merits of the blogging public? How dare they? I know why, or I think I do. One or two of you may disagree with me...but that is your prerogative.
Live and let live, as they say.
We all do it. We all have our favourites. We do it ourselves with every time we go to a blogger’s page and check to see if they’ve updated, and if they have we have different reactions depending on how much we like them. If they’ve written shedloads (still here, regulars? Blimey) and you love their work, you smile and settle down for a good read. If they are in the middle of your spectrum of tastes, then you feel a bit put upon to read all of it, so you read a bit and see if you fancy carrying on. If you’ve just dropped by for the first time, you might not bother at all.
And so the fear starts. Some of us write a lot every day, some write a few choice words at the weekend, but we’re all part and parcel of the blogosphere.
Other people and their reactions to you and your blogging have changed what you began, right? Once those people that sat inside ‘the whole world can see my site, theoretically’ resolved into individuals, things became more real. More...direct. They had expectations, these people. Like you have expectations of me.
If people have expectations of you and your site, and you want to please these people, you will want to pander to their wants. I know I do. You give thought to what you post, think about what will make an entertaining thought for the day, or a succinct and profound subject. Your blog changes...
Your impression of your reading public can assume immense proportions irrespective of their numbers – if you only have a few readers, you want to keep them, and so you try and please them all the more. This wanting to please can become almost a bane, a chore...something you resent. You want to blog but you don’t want to blog badly, so you don’t blog at all, and you feel annoyed about that. You get frustrated with the whole business, or incredibly tired of it all, fatigued almost.
This can really put dampers on the whole experience. Pressure. Worry.
Things some people blog to get rid of!
Hiatus. Closed blogs.
An avoidance of pressure...the feeling that in the circus of the blogosphere, your lot is that of the seal on a ball with a smaller ball on its nose. You have to perform.
Bollocks you do.
Mind you; live and let live, as they say.
If we’re not competing, we’re not competing. Your blog isn’t as good as, or better than, any other blog. Each person is different, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want to read smooth, heavily edited, passé, polished blog posts all day every day, from every blogger, on every subject...all that revision pushing people to universal subjects, thoughts, punchlines...
So I thought I’d stand up and be counted as being unafraid to blog as, when and how I like. I shall not shy away from Vomiting Vietnamese Weasels, nor the silent battle to avoid paying for toilet paper in my houseshare...if I feel like it. We are all different people, we will all want to blog about different things, we’ll write about them in different ways, see them in different ways, and readers will take different things away from reading depending on who they are.
Or we might not feel like blogging at all.
Live, and, as they say, let live.
I just wanted to reach out to you, reader, blogger, friend, whatever, and say a few words to you. They are the words of a man long dead, and by virtue of being very good words, they have stuck around a lot longer than he did.
I like these words a lot.
You might not.
Fair enough though – some people say live and let live. I am one of them.
Here they are:
Love, and do what you like.
The guy’s name was Augustine. I suspect he’d like you to know that.
If you like blogging, do it. If you don’t want to, Don’t do it.
But whatever you do, don’t feel that you got pushed into it by me, please.
I love you.
So do what you like.
don't you just love it when someone else puts into such fine words exactly what you've been pondering over...
thank you for saving me the bother :)
Nicely put.
I was self-indulgently reading my long-ago first blog earlier this week, and I loved the stuff I was writing and the style, and it was all so different when I didn't know my audience. I felt quite nostalgic.
But things change and people change, and I somehow can't reclaim Uborka from the audience, and I don't really want to.
Bravo! Bravo! Well said. I am a new blogger compared to many of my peers and even I notice when I write I seem to write FOR the audience and not for myself. It has come to a point when I too feel as if I must entertain my readers in order to keep them. I too have been feeling a bit resentful of that fact but after reading your words, I feel much better about relaxing a little bit and allowing myself to blog under my own terms!
Thanks for the advice and keep up the great work with your blog!!
Amen! I'm also not quite the most senior blogger around, but I write because I want to. I do feel a slight responsibility to people who read my blog, which is why I occasionally bung any old crap down! But, when alls said and done, it's my blog, I'll write what I like.
Great blog, by the way.
Well said!
I blog for me, primarily, and I remind myself of that when I start thinking "I won't write that, people are bored of that subject by now."
But is nice to write the odd piece consciously written as an audience-pleaser, or, at least with the audience in mind. But only because I want to.
I, for one, have managed to piss off almost every blogger "en el todo mundo" by calling my site a BLOG (apparently it's a four-letter epithet in Madrid)!
Blimey.
Well said, that man.
Because I've been blogging longer than I care to think about (3 years and 1 month - but I'm not saying that in a sort of "I've been blogging *so* long, I were here when all this were fields" style, but more in an "oh shit, that long?" way, I can confidently say that I started blogging while caring almost too much about what everyone thought and how I fitted in and who was reading me, etc etc etc; it was a popularity contest for me (hell, I was young and foolish; forgive me).
I then went through the stage of worrying a little too much about my readers - write that sort of thing, don't write this sort of thing and, yes, oh you can't talk about that because you've talked about it before.
Today, I kind of don't care. But in a good way, if you know what I mean. I'll kick up Movable Type, write something and post it. Other times I won't. Crucially, I don't *think* about it too much (or so I tell myself).
And I also get lost in the middle of long entries. Where was I?
no one I know in the 'real' world blogs. at all. was difficult at the start with absolutely no feedback, but then I got to the point where I just wrote, thinking of it as an online notebook or something. still a neophyte but I am really enjoying it.
you are just brilliant. Peace:)
this was, for me, in so many ways just spot. on.
thank you for writing it, stuart.
i think this is well-said, but someone could also take a break from blogging because he himself, or she herself, is dissatisfied with the material, regardless of the appreciation of any readers.
just, y'know, hypothetically.
but that comes back to the same moral you've come to. so you see, i'm not arguing.
Was it St Augustine? Wow. Coincidence. I was reading Niccolo Machiavelli a month ago, and thinking about how much like blogging his essays and St Augustine's were ('On Farting', anyone?).
But I didn't blog it. It would have seemed like saying - hey, my blog's as good as this stuff!
So it was cool to see you made the same comparison (if you did), only more elegantly.
Kudos.
Wow.
Came here via The Manly Smell ... and enjoyed the read agreeing with it immensely.
Good on ya.