The Grind and Crunch of Blog Production

A short piece by Fred of A VC fame about the time of day (early morning) that he finds to write prompted me to think of what I can only describe as the grind and crunch of blog production.

This is a topic that I don't see bloggers talk about very often. You see a great many generalities of course about finding time and making room in your life to write but there's really something more fundamental at stake than that: bloggers and writers in general must have a neurotic, incessant, nearly haunting drive to get in front of a keyboard hour-after-hour, day-after day in order to find popular success (which we can roughly define as a large-ish regular readership).

This is something – a condition – that you're born with, I'd wager. You either have it or you don't, and I'd be curious to hear someone describe a case where a writer developed this of sheer will.

Writing a blog is akin to generating a daily or nearly daily newspaper. Most blogs are one-person operations, so keeping the hum of the e-press going day in and day out – kids screaming, boss bawling, spouse lamenting – takes an enormous amount of staying power that is driven by the nightmare question lurking in the back of the blogger's brain: what will I write about next, and when will I write it?

And perhaps most important of all: will anyone care?

That mania forces the serious blogger to shove other responsibilities aside to get at that computer, to attack with a ferocity that will compel others in the digital void to take notice. That passion shines through and wins because it must.

So it's a mania driven of ego and fears and dreams, a blessed/cursed realm that all seriously drawn to the craft inhabit.

Stephen King describes writing a novel in On Writing as something close to trying to cross the Atlantic in a bathtub. I would agree as I've sunk (plunk to the depths) every time I've attempted this time-slurping and perilous voyage.

Blogging may be like trying to circle the globe on foot… and never stopping.

The grind and the crunch of blog production, I salute thee. I submit.