WordPress, and most other blogging platforms, allow you to save drafts; this function is useful if you have an idea you want to save for later, or if you can’t finish writing a post in one sitting. You can save your draft and come back to it at any time, on any computer with Internet access.
As much as I love this feature, there is one catch: you really need to return to your drafts in a timely manner. Upon inspecting my own blog posts, I found about a dozen drafts that I hadn’t touched in about a year.
While neglected drafts might inspire some people to return to a subject, especially if these drafts represent forgotten ideas, I could hardly remember what I wanted to communicate with my old, half-written posts.
My ideas were too vague to piece together, and I ended up deleting all the drafts. One of the drafts, untitled and from June 2009, actually made me laugh: “the issue of time and time-sensitive material”.
Well, about a year ago, I must have been very concerned about time-sensitive material, but the post was obviously not a top priority, as I had completely forgotten about it.
You may disagree, but I believe that blogging requires the writer to churn out content quickly and frequently while still maintaining SOME standard for quality. Doing things quickly means that you invite risk. If you’re not the kind of person who likes to take risks, then blogging is probably not for you.
Blogging will make you vulnerable, and you may regret things you write. But there’s a freedom to blogging too – it can allow you the ability to accept that you’re not perfect, that your opinions may change, and that you may not always know all the facts. The beauty of a blogger’s archive is the way it illustrates (hopefully) a person’s intellectual evolution.
Write about what’s current and relevant, in both your head and in society. Don’t wait too long to respond to your ideas because your response will lose its driving force.
(Photo by julio.garciah)
A very extroverted look at blogs and drafts.