Write, Loathe, Destroy

Generally speaking, my writing process goes through three stages. First I write. Then I loathe. Then I destroy. It's easy. Write, loathe, destroy. Let me give you an illustration of that, using the short blog entry you're currently reading (which, incidentally, is in the destroy phase). Here's how it originally read:

Apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, you're a nobody unless your name Google's well. Some time ago, Lifehacker ran a story about how to have a say in what Google says about you, which included the tip that you register your name. So there. The mystery is explained. I hope you can sleep better now. Incidentally, if you are going to register your name, here's a useful discussion thread on lifehacker about domain registrars people like and use. Personally, I use godaddy. They're affordable, and as a bonus, they go over the top with their superbowl commercials.

Short and crappy. Not that I have anything against "short," but it sounds like a commercial, right? Actually, that's not even how it read originally. That was after a makeover in which I attempted to make it useful, since it had failed already to be in any way interesting. Once I had written it, and moved on to the loathing stage, it left me with a real "so what" taste in my mouth. Once that had set in fully, I moved on to the destroy phase. First, by trying to make it useful. Now, by wrapping it in this negative commentary. See how the process works? Write, loathe, destroy. Now, I will say this. I think this approach to writing has kept me from successfully writing a blog for many years. Don't get me wrong, I've written plenty. But I've done a lot more of phases two and three, the loathing and destroying of blogs. Each time I'd get the itch, I'd start up a blog on another service. Sometimes annonymously, sometimes under my name. After a while, I'd start hating what I wrote. It would all sound like it was written just to be written, not because I particularly had anything to say (phase two), and then I'd get motivated to destroy all evidence of the blog's existence (phase three). Anyway, here we go again blogging. I'll try to resurrect old posts from the various blogs that seem worth resurrecting and post them with their original dates, but on the whole, it's going to be very difficult to dig up my victims and put them on display. If all this sounds very self-pittying and depressing, it aint. Really! Frankly, I don't even think it's very unique. My experience with other writers has been that they all have a love-hate relationship to writing (heavy on the hate), so there's nothing new here. In fact, I think on the whole there's something positive that happened here in that I managed to destroy the original post without deleting it. It reminds me of that Justice Breyer quote, "the remedy for speech you don’t like is not less speech, it is more speech." Now if I can just avoid wrapping this whole entry in a quote and doing it again...