Thursday, March 5, 2009

I'm not big on blogging. I should be, but I'm not.

Lemme drop a few facts on you: I'm a writer. Not only that, I'm a journalist. I'm a journalist who works for a quasi-top tier video game website. I own two blogs, this being one of them. I should be a blogging maniac, right?

Wrong.

It's a conundrum. Back when I was in Los Angeles for E3, my (now former) editor in chief and I were talking while dining on some sushi. We got on the subject of writing, and there was a clear difference between the two of us - he writes for fun, writes to excel, writes just for the hell of it. Me? I write when I need to. Write a news post, write an essay, write an article. I just can't see myself writing solid chunks of text unless it's to satisfy some requirement or deadline. That's just how I function. But as I contrasted our two writing methodologies, it got me thinking: am I a bad writer? Am I even a writer? Am I doomed to dissatisfaction if I continue down this path? Yeesh. Inner dilemmas ahoy.

I mean, don't get me wrong - I do enjoy the act of writing. Or, I'm good at it (to some extent), at the least. But then again, writing doesn't take any effort for me - it's just like pulling thoughts straight out of my head and slapping them onto paper (or, in this case, a monitor). I just can't help but feel like I don't have the time to sit down and write blog posts. Either that or I feel like there are better ways to spend my time. Super Smash Bros. Brawl, anyone?

Maybe it's true that we're all starting to lose our attention spans for reading/writing long strings of text and I'm just falling in line. I mean, I do still write, it's just on more rapid means. And social means. You know, like Twitter. I guess writing articles for The Foghorn counts as writing for fun, but even then I only manage to gain up the motivation to write the articles out of the desire to meet a deadline.

I guess it all just comes down to my lifelong lack of motivation. But I think that's a story for another time. Bottom line: blogging just isn't for me. I'll blog sometimes if I feel like, I'll blog if I have to for an assignment (hey, like this one!), but when it comes down to it, I just don't have the motivation to become a frequent blogger.

1 comment:

david silver said...

nice post jonny.

for you, i don't think the question is "should you blog or not blog," i think it is "should you write when it's not required or not." personally, i say, "yes!" but that's mostly because i like your writing and would like to see where it goes when it's not being pushed by a requirement or deadline. whether that non-required writing takes place on your blog or else where is, to me, sort of irrelevant. again, nice post!

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