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Why I Blog
Although there is some overlap, the reasons why I write are different from the reasons why I blog. I’ll list my motives for blogging below:
Self Promotion
It’s my intention to write as many stories as it takes until I finish a better than good work of fiction. In the meantime, I’m working on associating my name with writing and storytelling. If I ever create something I want to formally promote, it’ll be easier to find an audience after doing some groundwork.
Ego
Blogging brings instant gratification. It feels good knowing eyes are seeing something I’ve created. This is perhaps as innocent as my desire as a kid to see my mom put a drawing on the fridge for all to see; but now I have tools that show me the amount and frequency of eyes. When droves of eyes come to something specific, it’s an indication I’ve created something interesting—something to be shared. The problem is this: When I use this indicator as a measure of my worth, it leads to a warped view of what is weighty in my life.
Networking
Blogging is an efficient way to stay connected with a large amount of people. If I read people’s blogs and they read mine, it’s easier to maintain and develop professional relationships.
Creative Collaboration
I’m one of those early adopters. I’m fascinated by new technology and how it affects culture and spawns subculture. My blog is a venue to find new media spelunking partners and collaborate in new spaces. If I publish thoughts about what fascinates me, it leads to people with like interests giving me input. I regularly publish creative commons works, so people don’t even need to ask if they want to run with a concept. I want to see what happens.
I’ll just list some of my more obvious motives:
If you are an aspiring writer like myself and the structure and spirit of this post are not familiar, I urge you to read George Orwell’s essay, “Why I Write.” It’s the inspiration and philosophical groundwork for this post. I’ll leave you with the last paragraph from Orwell’s essay, which gets me more hype about writing than any song on my iPod ever could:
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
—Ok actually, if Jay-Z rapped this, it would make me more hyped.
What motives drive you to blog, and which are most worth pursuing?
