John Miedema

Reading Causes Writing, Pt. 3

Readers of my blog know that I have used it to draft other projects. I blogged early material on slow reading, and blogged my way through two phases of development of my pet software project, OpenBook. At present, I am cutting an early draft of I, Reader using my blog. It fits with the subject, the inquiry into the connections between reading and web participation. As my posts pass the twenty count, I find myself going back to previous posts, updating them. I find myself adding comments to my own posts. It is timely to say a few things about the process of blogging a book idea.

General

1. My very first draft is an assembly of notes I have compiled and sorted offline over several months. This draft is a second draft.
2. Inexperienced writers think that others will steal their ideas. I suggest to you that ideas are a dime a dozen and the real value is in the final writing, something you may or may not wish to blog. On the other hand, some publishers and writers give out free, full-text copies of their work on-line, as way to get known and increase print sales.

What works: The social aspect

1. Blogging compels me to write more succinctly. No fluff. Web readers will glaze over long, meandering posts. Succinct posts are very useful for organizing information for a third draft.
2. Blogging invokes the presence of ‘Other’. No bull, others are watching. If I write bull, I lose them. I use the web as I write to confirm and hone my facts.
3. Comments allow me to find blind spots in my thinking. Responses show me what content is most appealing. More critical comments would be nice.
4. Comments often provide social approval, which is not necessary, but it always nice.

Limitations: Software flexibility

1. WordPress is a good content management tool. I can, in principle, sequence and re-sequence posts, make conceptual links through hyperlinks and tags, and visualize these relationships. If I work on-line, the process is quite slow due to network lag, and that is slow enough to stall the thought process. There is software that allows you to write off-line then post, but it would be nice if WordPress had an off-line mode that later synchronized everything at a touch.
2. I am using my blog like a wiki, saving all relevant material in one place. If I find a new article on the web, I want to quickly link it to a post I have written before. I should be able to add notes to previous posts more easily. I have started using comments to do this. The Zotero research tool is a good model, but it does not provide blog-level writing capability.
3. While blogs appear to be an enduring tool for long-form writing, anything short-form, including comments, seems better suited to Twitter-type tools. Tweetboard provides a nice integration tool, but I can’t seem to get an alpha invite.

Reading led me to writing and blogging. The malleable nature of the web leads me to think I can improve it to let me write and blog better, in turn serving my reading purposes. OpenBook was an example of that thinking. Maybe, I will throw in my hand again to improve WordPress’ drafting capabilities. Maybe.