A year of daily blogging, and five all told

On Monday, I reached five years of blogging, though I've only just realised that today. More than 1,400 posts and about 10,000 comments later (altogether about 1.5 million words), I'm not going to indulge in a retrospective spanning that whole time, though will note again the renewed focus I mentioned here. Instead, I will restrain myself to a brief comment about the last twelve months.

After a slow 2009 and first half of 2010, I decided around this time last year to blog more regularly. This was an attempt to overcome a broader writing inertia where I was finding it difficult to get anything down. The sluggishness of my blog was not because I was powering ahead with thesis writing, but indicated the poverty of written production across the board. On the advice that trying to write anything is a good way to starting to write something, I started being quite deliberate about posting more regularly, and within a couple of weeks was posting at least once per day. I have managed to keep this up now for a whole year, only missing two or three days since this time last year. Sometimes this has involved setting up a few posts ahead of time when I was going to be away (and a couple of times a little backdating to cover my tracks), but I have (more or less) made it.

Has it worked? Well, I think I have moved further on my thesis over the last twelve months than the preceding twelve, though there is still a long way to go. To that end, I am going to leave myself a little more room now that I have some small amount of momentum. Posting will certainly not stop here, but there may be a few more days missed. I don't think anyone is going to be shedding any tears over that, but I thought it might be worth flagging it anyway.

Due to popular demand, I will continue to post dumps of links that I come across, though I have also been trying to cut down my web reading to make room for more "serious" reading. Nonetheless, the nature of my project means that keeping abreast of current stories and studies is, if not required, then at least somewhat helpful. One shift that I hope to implement is to include more explicit interaction with scriptural text, which will (God willing) reflect more such engagement in my thesis work.

Five years probably deserves more of an effort at taking stock, and it certainly deserves the much-needed and frequently promised update to the format, feel and navigation of this site. But instead I muddle on with the wreckage of past posts gradually piling behind me and an ever-growing number of half-baked ideas scattered in front of me (I have about 350 draft posts at last count). That, for today, will have to do.

What are blogs for?

For beautiful writing.

Slow and steady... is a difficult pace

I have long known that my writing skills are more hare than tortoise. I seem to work in fairly unpredictable bursts of productivity, or rather, depressingly predictable ones during the last minute before a deadline. Over the years I have oscillated between attempts at reform and embracing this pattern. I have known for some time that I probably wanted to do a PhD and also knew that while last minute sprints could get me through endless essays during my nine undergraduate years, you can't sprint through a PhD.

I have tried writing every day* (and failed). I have tried setting myself shorter term deadlines (and failed). I have tried asking for external deadlines (and failed). I have tried treating my study more like work (and failed). I have tried banning distractions (and failed). I guess I'm looking for new inspiration. How have others wrestled with this issue? What have been your successes and failures?
*Probably the closest was when I was blogging more regularly and would aim to put up at least 5 posts each week. You can see by the numbers on the sidebar which months have been more or less productive.

Habitual thinking and the fragility of new ideas

I have often had a thought, say, in the middle of the night or in the shower (that most productive of thinking time) and tell myself "I should write that down". Being unable to, I then usually think, "If it's a good enough thought it will stay with me. It will soak into my consciousness and come back to me at a relevant moment."

But it never does.

I realised recently just how frequently this occurs and how many thoughts were dissolving in the quotidian grind. Old familiar thoughts have the inertia of repetition to make them normal, and so they easily recur when one faces a similar situation again. Thought gets into habits, follows grooves worn by the drip of previous thoughts. But new thoughts are fragile. They have to be nurtured or lost.

Moral: write it down.

The Faithful Writer redux

Haydn over at The Giraffe Pen has written a summary and offered some reflections about the writer's conference on Saturday that I mentioned back here. His footnote about whether Christians ought ever to be deliberately 'aggressive' and 'annoying' (as was suggested during one panel time) has generated an interesting conversation.

UPDATE: I didn't get a chance to offer my own opinion on this matter as I was in a rush when I posted this last night. While I am all for being provocative and subversive, I do not think that these straightforwardly equate with being aggressive or annoying. Paul says Let your speech always be gracious, seasonsed with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone (Colossians 4.6). It is the very graciousness of our speech that is most tasty. This doesn't necessarily mean being 'polite', but we are not gospel shock-jocks, out to provoke any reaction we can. To think we are assumes that apathy is the greatest problem our hearers face. However, in my experience, apathy can itself often be a protective mechanism to avoid repeating the pain of previous ungracious speech.

The discussion has also been raging over on MPJ's blog (and here).

The Faithful Writer

On Saturday 28th July, CASE and Matthias Media are running a one day conference at UNSW called The Faithful Writer for Christians to think about how writing can be service. The main speakers will be Tony Payne and Greg Clarke, and then there will be a number of panel discussions: Writing as Ministry; Writing and the Internet (including yours truly on the panel); Christians and fiction; Writing for impact. Sounds fun? Registration is $70/$55 before 21st July or $90/$75 after it.

It just got a write up today in Southern Cross, including a scintillating interview with one of the panellists.

Eco on writing for others

[There is] another view common to bad writers - namely, that one writes only for oneself. Do not trust those who say so: they are dishonest and lying narcissists.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list. It helps to remember what you have to buy, and when you have bought everything you can destroy it, because it is no use to anyone else. Every other thing that you write, you write to say something to someone.

I have often asked myself: would I still write today if they told me that tomorrow a cosmic catastrophe would destroy the universe, so that no one could read tomorrow what I wrote today?

My first instinct is to reply no. Why write if no one will read me? My second instinct is to say yes, but only because I cherish the desperate hope that, amid the galactic catastrophe, some star might survive, and in the future someone might decipher my signs. In that case writing, even on the eve of the Apocalypse, would still make sense.

One writes only for a reader. Whoever says he writes only for himself is not necessarily lying. It is just that he is frighteningly atheistic. Even from a rigorously secular point of view.

Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future reader.

-Umberto Eco, 'How I Write' in On Literature, 334.