Idleness

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If maybe I did just something, no matter how little, to keep this thing moving forward every day, that would be better than doing nothing.

It's easy to blame my lack of enthusiasm for blogging every day on not having enough ideas, but after thinking about it more, I don't think that's really the issue.

Sure, it's tough to come up with material, and it's even tougher to force yourself to develop vague ideas into concrete posts or stories or comics, when it takes hours of concentrated effort to do so.

But I think one area that went wrong more than others was the imaginary standard I tried to keep up in terms of quality of posts and comics, which was difficult to meet without rigorous, earnest, and steadfast effort -- and when that effort is met with the same compensation as putting in almost no effort at all, it's difficult to keep up that enthusiasm for it's own sake indefinitely.

Inertia

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Looking at it like it's a job, I can't change anything about how much I'm compensated -- that will always be the same, sometimes feeling like enough, and sometimes feeling like nothing. 

So I'll just have to change the amount of effort I'm willing to exchange for that return.

Obstructed

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At some point, then, this idea of practicing my writing and drawing voice, and creating stories and worlds of stories out of them, became insufficient incentive to keep moving forward.

Sabotaged

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I started the blog to get more practice writing stories and drawing pictures, and to find out if there's a way that I write stories and draw pictures that is clearly mine.

Damaged

Photo by John Hult
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Do either of these characterizations apply to what happened with this blog?

I can answer that question with another question, why did I start the blog in the first place?

Unsound

Photo by Caroline Methot
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I think there are really two honest ways of looking at this kind of project: you can look at it as a job, or you can look at it as a relationship (unless these aren't two different things).

If it's a job, then you have to be compensated; maybe people stop blogging because they no longer feel like they're getting paid enough (usually nothing, unless asked-for attention counts), or because they realize they won't ever be paid enough to keep the work going.

Or if it's a relationship, then it gradually becomes one-sided; people who blog get to feel that they're putting more into it than they're getting out, and they get bored, and they get tired.

My question remains: how does one fix this?

Rickety

Photo by Hoshino Ai
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So what then, what fresh hell is this?

We’re not allowed to be happy being creative forever, and we’re not allowed to be happy avoiding creativity forever and just watching netflix and eating cupcakes -- what gives?

It seems like a kinder world would have allowed for contentment doing one or the other indefinitely.

Whining aside, it’s probably time to try and give a better idea of what I’m trying to write about with these posts -- obviously, as stated before, it’s no real mystery why blogs stop being blogs, and people stop updating them.

What I’m really trying to figure out is, when the steam runs out and the interest shifts, how does one shift it back again at will, is that possible?

It’s 100% possible to keep on working when you don’t feel it anymore, of course that’s true; what I mean is how can you re-discover the interest in a project like this after its worn through?

One of the people I’ve talked to about this suggested that blogs sometimes die because their authors “stop writing about life, and start living it instead.”

It’s pretty to think so, and I believe that that’s at least partially the answer, but I don’t think that’s the whole answer.

Tumbledown

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Obviously running out of ideas must have something to do with it; if one has enough ideas and is excited enough about them, it almost takes effort not to try and make something out of them.  

But I don’t think it cuts to the heart of the issue.

Part of the problem I think has to do with where ideas come from in the first place, which we dealt with in an earlier entry.

Time spent in a quiet, thoughtful attitude, free and regular research into any area that resonates with one’s interests, and above all patience, and diligence in trying to produce SOMETHING, whether it’s a good idea or not.

If you’re trying to come up with SOME ideas every day, or even just one idea, sooner or later the law of averages says SOME of those ideas have to be better than others -- I think.

I would imagine that when all of these fail, for the various reasons that they fail, then we’re probably getting closer to what changes in the blogger when they decide, consciously or otherwise, to  give up their blog.

Or, like we said at the start, it’s simple: interests shift, and what is interesting and rewarding at one point becomes tedious, uninspired, and ultimately actually detrimental to one’s creative spirit.

In some ways, the deck is stacked against those of us inclined naturally to be more creative at heart.

For one thing, I think creativity is a mark of at least some kind of intelligence; I’m not saying that anyone who feels creative or acts creatively is automatically more creative than someone who does not, I’m only saying that nothing comes from nothing, and that something genuinely creative has to come from somewhere.

What measure do we have for intelligence after all, if not results?

What I’m getting at is, one of the hallmarks I think of an intelligent mind, or at least an undisciplined mind, like mine for instance, is that it easily gets addicted to distraction.

Addicted might be too strong a word, but I like to use it because when one tries to give up television, video games, social media, entertaining websites, and the thousand other ways we can embroider our free time these days, I find that one goes through something not unlike a withdrawal: restlessness, and at the same time purposelessness, irritability, and constant cravings to turn the TV or music or whatever back on.

I have a suspicion, confirmed by many other people who have written about this over the years, that a certain kind of boredom and the creative impulse go hand in hand.

Not just any kind of boredom, I don’t think -- we can go into that more later -- but a certain kind of boredom, which is relieved by making something, is probably also satisfied, or at least quieted down, by entertainments of any kind.

Why quieted down, and not satisfied?

Because sooner or later, as in now for instance, the person who sought entertainment and distraction for as long as they pleased starts to feel just as restless and irritable and purposeless feeling about entertainment as they did before about not having the entertainment, and they are driven back to try and be creative again.

Disintegrating

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      I suppose the only place I can reasonably start to look for answers is in my own experience.  I would like to say that my blog hasn’t been abandoned, but instead is perhaps on life support, having only one or two very simple posts in a whole month since the middle of last year, but still having at least one post a month; to be honest this was more or less so that the drop-down menus on the right-hand side of the screen wouldn’t be completely unpopulated at a casual glance.  But to be even more honest, of course, I have had no plans to put anything up here for some time, no new comics, no new stories.

      The essays I feel like were never the biggest draw when it came to finding an audience, with the exception of the illustrated humor essays which were more or less pirating wholesale the style and delivery of other (and of course more popular) blogs than my own, such as The Oatmeal, Hyperbole and a Half, and others.  Which is kind of a shame, only because the essays were the easiest part to write, probably because they required almost no research or hard work, and were only essays in that my mind-transfer to the screen was supposed to be working towards a point -- this is getting off topic.

      If my blog weren’t becoming a derelict (thank goodness for at least that “becoming”), I would have been trying to think of uses I could make of it, or, more importantly, looking forward to working on it again.

      I suppose the idea all along as been to continue developing my voice as a writer, which is only achieved and maintained (so I’m told, and so I in part believe from experience), by practice.  The problem of course is that one can’t just practice writing without having anything to write about; for starters if you don’t know even vaguely what you’re trying to do, you’ll have no idea when you’re managing to make it work or not.  So to have a blog you need it to be about something -- I won’t go into the question of what this blog is about, that problem is unsolvable.

      But thinking about blogging as a thing, and trying to take apart into pieces the actions and reasons involved in bringing it into being, is encouraging, because if there’s something here that’s gone wrong that I can fix, getting a closer look at the work can’t hurt in trying to find it.

      About the only thing resembling an insight that’s occurred to me so far since I began working on this series of posts is that a blog is a tool, just like the computer I’m writing it on, and (more or less) the table and chair the computer and I are resting on while I write.  Tools are, loosely defined, a sort of durable resource that help manipulate other less durable resources; pens and paper manipulate ink, books and the visual cortex manipulate words, hands manipulate all of these but the last (hopefully).

      So by this reasoning a blog is a tool that manipulates -- what?  What is a blog’s raw material?  To a certain extent it depends on the blog -- some are mostly about words, others photos, others family videos, or song files, or mathematical formulas, or sequences of code, or data to be downloaded and used on a 3D printer.

      So our brief foray into amateur analysis leads to the helpful and wonderfully original insight that a blog is powered by their creator's mental contents - experiences, thoughts, emotions.  Surely there has to be a better explanation of why blogs run to a halt than the idea that their creators eventually run out of ideas.

Untenanted

     

Photo by Mikael Kristenson
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Why do people start blogs in the first place?  What is it about blogging at the start that changes by the time the work is set aside?  What are people hoping to get out of the work?  

     Should they have changed their expectations when they didn’t receive what they’d been hoping for?  Is there a natural stopping point that people reach, or maybe even exceed before realizing it?  When personal interest in a creative project fails, who benefits from the creator continuing to soldier on?

     I’m sure that every different abandoned blog out there would have different answers to each of these questions.

     A diligent, well-trained, and possibly financed (at least with time) researcher and statistician could probably come up with answers from the sea of data at our fingertips (just click “next blog” up above and see if there are posts from this year, or even 2015), but for us poor armchair analysts, broad and obvious principles will have to serve for a starting point.

Deserted

photo by Liam Andrew
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So why do blogs get abandoned?  It's hardly a mystery what's happened in these cases; people move on, their interests shift.  They either lose the compulsion to publish material, or stop feeling rewarded by doing so, or both.  But as obvious and maybe even natural as this process is, we learn anything from it about creativity?

Happy February!

Untended

Photo by Pawel Kadysz
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When I peruse the other random blogs on this website, it seems to be the one consistent thing I see again and again.  A few last posts at the end, usually beginning with "it's been a while, I'm going to try to get back into this," and then radio silence for empty years and nothing in the present at all.

Ramshackle

Photo by Pablo Garcia Saldaña
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I think one of the saddest things you can find online is a blog that's apparently been abandoned.