0 Comments The Horrors of My Writing Experience | Imported Post

The second and last imported post from Medium is here (I told you I didn't write much while I was there). This one is more of an introductory post for the blog rather than a regular stand-alone post, but it does express some ideas as to why I generally struggle to write. Again, sorry for the formatting, I swear it's not me!

"I was never particularly good at expressing my thoughts. And I think a lot on a daily basis, as many of us do, with a general tendency to overthink things. Sometimes I figure that maybe (just maybe) the whole magnitude of thought building up in my head over time is the problem, that I simply cannot cope and condense it to clever and elegant little thoughts to share. And this reveals the second problem, which is specific to my writing - even if I were to write something, would others find it enjoyable and clever to read?

See, I am an extremely fussy reader myself, and I get put off by great many things which others would probably find quite insignificant. Like grammatical errors. Or poor formatting (I am only not using Justified text formatting now since Medium only allows Left or Centre, and my ‘OCD Sense’ is tingling). I also tend to get bored of bad or plain writing pretty quickly and without guilt. And, since I am my best critic, whatever I think about writing (and sometimes I find my thoughts rather interesting) undergoes strict censorship inside my head by great many parameters, usually to the extent of leaving me with zero enthusiasm. Oh, and did I tell you English was not my first language?

The other big thing for me is engaging with the reader. You see, even though I am a massive procrastinator and regularly engage myself with admittedly pointless activities, I feel that writing something without expecting it to be read by at least someone, is a worthless waste of time and energy. And I’m not one of those free spirits who finds peace in simply letting it out. I find great satisfaction in knowing that people find something of interest in what I have to say, and maybe even more so when I see them interested enough to say something in return.

Finally, my circles… Oh, the horror of letting it slip to someone that I have started a blog!.. I am exaggerating, of course, but I do find my relative anonymity to the Internet community somewhat soothing, at least in the beginning. This blog is a brave new step for me, there is a lot of discovering to do along the way, and I hope my stories and thoughts will be worth your while."

E.V.

0 Comments On my Medium Experience and Another Blogging Issues

Ok, now that it's been just over a month since I created this new blog I think I'm finally beginning to understand what I want it to look like. 

Before I continue, I have to say that I experimented with Medium. At the first sight I was strongly attracted to Medium's simplicity, which supposedly took every bit of distraction away leaving a blank 'sheet' for one to write on. Pure creativity, no shenanigans. And I was happy with the way things worked - no customisation to worry about, minimum formatting, and so on. I even got a few pageviews and reads, too.

Soon enough, however, I began feeling a bit intimidated and plain annoyed with it. Looking through the suggested posts on the main page it appeared like the whole platform was inhabited by columnists, book-writers and overall some sort of professionals that came there to share their wisdom with the world. 

My suggested/recommended posts feed was filled with posts, or articles rather, along the lines of "Why <something everyone does> is a bad idea", "How to <make, improve, excel at> <some product or process> in few easy steps", "Why you shouldn't be doing <something that you do>", "What mistake has <a famous person from a specialised field> made", and many many other variations. A lot of them screamed of pretentiousness and fakeness around us, and how things like travelling have succumbed to being a vain rather than mind-opening activity. And although I did agree with a few of the ideas myself, in its entirety the content on that platform turned out to be very different from what I always understood by blogging.

Just to be clear, to me the idea behind it is probably one of the best ideas ever when it comes to blogging - minimalistic design with minimum distractions to help focus on writing. What could be better? But from what it looks like, using Medium has turned into somewhat of a 'fashion statement' screaming "I chose to leave mediocre mainstream platforms in favour of this professional-looking site where everything I say will look important". Or it is simply an article-writing platform.

I just think that blogging needs to be a bit more personal, a bit more engaging rather than simply tossing dry instructions or ideas at the reader. I believe that a bond should be formed between the blogger and the reader, where the story is told or a thought is shared, and where the reader follows the story and the whole blog just like reading chapters of an infinite book. 

What I try to achieve in my blog is to record whatever I would put in a personal journal with slight censorship correction, obviously. Stories? Maybe. Maybe even some creative writing, but I cannot yet say for sure. Hopefully something of interest to you as the reader. But I want to make it personal. I want to make it a continuation of myself, if I may say so. I want to share because I want to share and for no other reason.

I think the point has been made, so take care for now! 

E.V.