More Writing About Writing

This is one of those (Thankfully rare.) days when I want to post something but don't have anything to post about. Obviously, that's not literally true. I have a fair few ideas for posts but all of them require time, effort and research, none of which they're going to get today.

I feel I have to come up with something all the same. I don't want to skip a day because I just skipped two and I won't be posting tomorrow since I'll be working. On the other hand, I have a bunch of things I have to do today and I don't see myself finding the requisite two-to-four hours it generally takes me to put a full-length post together.

This could be a good time to re-assess my approach to posting. I've been saying for years that I would like to do shorter posts. I don't really want to lower the frequency - five or six days a week seems about right - but I would like to cut the average time-to-write, per post, down to something closer to 90 minutes than three hours. 

One really obvious thing I could do would be to stop the grab-bag posts that jam four or five mostly unrelated topics together and post about each of them separately instead. That way I'd get the best part of a week's posts from one installment. 

The argument for doing the portmanteau posts in the first place is that none of the subjects justifies a post of its own but the last grab-bag was close to two and a half thousand words, about five hundred for each segment. Five hundred words would be a short post but not that short by general blogging standards. 

The problem with that solution is that, if I'd made each topic into a post of its own it's unlikely I'd also find four or five days in a row when something more immediate didn't push itself to the front of the queue. Some - maybe most - of those topics would never get written about at all, which would irk me.

I could compromise and split the whole thing in two, of course. Then I'd have material for a couple of posts around a thousand words long, which is a very good length. I could then either finish the lot in a day and take the next day off or take half as long to come up with a post each day, for two days. Either of those sound like welcome outcomes.

This all makes it sound like I have a problem with planning or scheduling but that's not really what's going on. What tends to happen is that while I'm writing I get so into what I'm doing that I can't stop. It's a paradox that I enjoy it so much I go on for too long and then I'm unhappy that I spent so long doing it.

There is another possible reason to separate out the disparate elements in these collections and that's the effect it may be having on comments. It's hard enough to generate comments as it is, especially with every blogging platform doing it's damnedest to obstruct the process, but it's been my experience that the longer and more in-depth a post becomes, the less likely it is that anyone's going to respond.

This is entirely a subjective, unverified impression but it's long been my feeling that short posts are more likely to receive comments. For one thing, it's a lot more likely people will actually read them. People seem to be put off by essays and who can blame them?

Even when the text is broken up into multiple sections, I sometimes wonder if many people even see the second half of the post or whether they'll have given up before they get there. In the case of the longer grab-bag posts or things like the music posts, where there are upwards of a dozen items and often an introduction that's the length of a full post as well, it does seem like a lot to expect.

Anyway, this post has already turned into an exemplar of the problem I'm attempting to delineate. I just ran it through a word-counter and it's already almost seven hundred words long. If I wasn't actively thinking about the danger, having just been talking about it, there's every chance I'd keep banging away at the keyboard, following this topic down into the depths of self-analysis and speculation, until I'd spent half the day it to finish up with something the length of a chapter in a novel.

On that note I'm going to stop. Once again I've successfully proved I can fill a page with words even when I have absolutely nothing to write about. Whether anyone would ever want to read it is another question and one to which I'm probably better off not knowing the answer. 

With a bit of luck, though, I might at least remember some of what I've just said next time I sit down and start trying to stuff half a dozen topics into a single post. If you see some short, pithy takes on small, specific subjects and find yourself thinking "Those would have been much better in a Grab Bag" then you'll know my cunning plan worked.