COMMONPLACE

I’ve tried to blog many times over the years. Aside from my life-long inability to keep any kind of regular diary for more than a few months, blogging about oneself seems incalculably trite. And damnation but I hate a long-worded ramble about people’s family values on my way to their rhubarb pie recipe. Being no great fount of wisdom about any particular thing, I have never felt I had much to write about.

And then I read this piece by Cory Doctorow.

Doctorow is already a bit of a legend, and this goes a very long way towards explaining how and why. It is also the most instrumental, calculating, analytical, yet least mercenary (Doctorow’s emphasis) description of the value of blogs I have ever read. It has altered my worldview considerably, and I say that as a person who actively alters their worldview on the regular. I do enjoy it when an outside force does it for me.

For you TL:DR types, what makes this different from all other advice I’ve read about blogs? It’s the fact that Doctorow’s primary audience is himself. Most advice says to use the blog to make yourself likeable, create a human persona so you can “connect” with your “target audience.” Whatever you do, don’t write about writing, they say, even though my favourite authors blog about writing all the time. Even though we’re meant to “take the reader on our creative journey.” Write instead about your “passion” or some hobby or your pets… then mention to fans of this aspect of yourself that you happen to write books…

This feels like trying to suck up to rich classmates by talking about horses, then asking if they’ll buy your lemonade. Dude, I’m busy. My passion is writing more books.  I don’t want to make small talk. If I’m taking the time to write blog posts, it’s gonna have to be about bigger stuff, and it’s going to have to serve me more directly.

“(T)he thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.”

Doctorow welcomes the public to observe, comment, suggest, reframe and so on, but he blogs first of all to keep a record of his own thinking. Yes, a book or a private e-journal does the same thing, but the internal coding of blog design makes them taggable and searchable. All his ideas, given at least the semblance of coherence, cross referenced, and available all the time, everywhere.  I wept, just a little.  So much of my time goes to what can only be termed data management that the thought of carrying everything around in a neat little (searchable) package was frankly staggering.

The Commonplace Book as Doctorow describes it is present in mainstream thought most obviously as the Bullet Journal.  Many bulleters do indeed publish, as five minutes with the hashtag will reveal.

But I don’t know what I’ll do. Utterly inconclusive I admit, but I have a well-practiced habit of promising more than I can deliver, and so I now make far fewer promises. Is this my Commonplace Book? Comments clearly welcome.