MinneapolitanMusic

I just finished reading a fantastic article in the New York Times Magazine by Emily Gould, a New York blogger who used to write for gossip blog Gawker. The premise of the article is that Gould used to write extensively about her personal life on her blog, with disastrous real-life results. I found a couple of passages especially intriguing:

First, Gould explains how her urge to blog suddenly dried up, a fate I also faced a year or two ago when I began to find it increasingly difficult to write personally online.

The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn’t realize was that those ideas and that urgency — and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head — could just disappear.

I don't know that I ever fully recovered from my stupor; I certainly haven't started writing more frequently or more deeply in this forum. What I have learned, however, is that the more I realized that people actually read my blog, the harder it became to post with honesty. For a while, it stopped being just my dad and a handful of friends, and became a rising number of nameless, faceless readers. The thought of these anonymous skimmers finding out facts about my actual life was terrifying. Sure, my words will never reach an audience as large as Emily's, but I can identify with her feelings of uncertainty.

Which ties in nicely with this other excerpt:

But lately, online, I’ve found myself doing something unexpected: keeping the personal details of my current life to myself. This doesn’t make me feel stifled so much as it makes me feel protected, as if my thoughts might actually be worth honing rather than spewing.

It's true; rather than rushing to the keyboard every time something notable happens, I have found a joy in letting my thoughts simmer. Sometimes, I don't write about events in my life until months after they have actually happened, and even then I keep the writing to myself and spend time revising my work. Rather than having to respond to things instantaneously, I am given a chance to mull things over. More and more, I am preferring this method. Which isn't to say that I am done sharing things about my life; I am still producing just as much if not more writing than when I blogged every day, and eventually I will find a way to put some of it out there for consumption. But I'm not ready, quite yet.