Thursday, December 26, 2019

“One puny blog post”


[Nancy, December 26, 2019.]

I’ll take a guess: Because, Nancy, you care about your writing, and you want to make that “one puny blog post” as good as you can. It doesn’t matter that you’re not getting paid to do so. It doesn’t matter that no one else might notice, or have any idea how much effort you’ve put in. You will notice, and as the poet almost says, that will make all the difference.

Nancy’s friend Esther has a better guess: “Because you’re using every chance you get as an excuse to be distracted.”

And Nancy: “No, no, that can’t be it . . . but it’s interesting that you feel that way, and we should spend the next half-hour exploring why.”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[“As the poet says”? “As the poet said”? The Google Ngram Viewer helps out. The poet, of course, is Robert Frost.]

comments: 2

The Arthurian said...

The Nancy in me says [said] Yeah!
The anonymous alcoholic in me mumbled agreement, and had another.
When my writing exceeds a page and a half or so, I lose control of it. I'm in one of those right now, and the one thing that keeps me writing is the widening timegap between my last blog post and my next one.

Looks like ngram says "neither".

Michael Leddy said...

If I’m writing something of any length, I tend to take a long time getting started, and then once I’m writing, I’ll break off at an arbitrary point, with a pretty good idea of how to pick up again. I think there’s a lot to be said for not pushing things. Sometimes, anyway.