Call Me Ishmael- In Search Of the Perfect Post
“Call Me Ishmael.” Thanks to Herman Melville I cannot take credit for the opening line of this post, but I can thank him for helping me to set the tone. I am on a journey, a quest to find the perfect post. That is my own white whale.
I rarely am ever satisfied with my writing. It is always lacking. The rhythm, the rhyme, the tone, the words are not quite what I want. I feel like Tantalus. The eloquence I seek is always just beyond my reach.
As I surf the blogosphere I come across others who do such a good job turning a phrase. I stumble onto writers whose command of the language is superior to my own and in turn I am reminded of just how hard I need to work to improve.
If memory serves Robert has said on more than one occasion that writing is rewriting. I understand and appreciate that. Writing can almost always be improved upon. It is a practice that I should take on. I should spend more time rewriting and revising my work but…
I don’t do it because I don’t like doing it and in my blog I feel that I can get by without it. I blog by feel. I write what sits on my soul and I do it through a style that I think of as being stream-of-consciousness.
You, the reader are granted access to my unedited thoughts. Ok, that is not completely true, there is some minor editing. But the reality is that there really is very little of it. It passes from my mind to the keyboard and there you have it.
It is a topic that I have touched upon in previous posts, why I blog that is. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t care about comments. Ultimately I write for myself and would continue even if no one said anything, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the feedback and the dialogue.
In terms of comments the most popular post I ever created is called What Do You Call Your Blog. In my experience the posts that receive the most feedback usually are about blogging.
In my search for the perfect post I have learned many things. The most important of these lessons is the reminder that writing is an exercise and like other exercises it can be improved upon. My suggestion is to read, read, read and write, write, write.
Read as much as you can. Look at how others construct their posts, their stories, their sentences and their novels. But never forget to just keep writing. The More that you do it the Easier it Becomes.
Jack's Shack August 22, 2006 at 6:16 am
PP,
I suppose so.
PT,
“The Crawling Eye.” I like it.
PsychoToddler August 21, 2006 at 5:38 pm
I am working now on the ultimate blog post. I don’t actually have time to write it, since I am reading your blog and also I’m supposed to be working. But I hope to write it soon.
And it will be called, “The Crawling Eye.”
tafka PP August 21, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Writing about blogging is an artform in itself.
Jack's Shack August 21, 2006 at 6:15 am
Hi Shoshana/CM,
Very true. I agree that it is important to have feeling there and that this can help to distinguish a post.
However, sometimes it doesn’t matter how much feeling you have if you cannot express it in a way that makes sense to others.
cruisin-mom August 20, 2006 at 4:06 pm
I agree with much of what Shoshana says…from the heart (with a bit of tweaking and rewriting), is always good.
Shoshana August 20, 2006 at 2:16 pm
I was told on many occasions by the best professor I ever had that writing only ends because of a deadline – you can always improve upon it. That being said, I almost never edit anything. If I run a spell-check, I’m far beyond my usual. I guess I learned a lot.
I think the best posts are the ones written with feeling – they just flow and are real. Technically they may not be perfect, but when you write from the heart, it speaks to others.