RSS FeedFri 17 Oct 2008
What percentage of your posts never make it to publication? Now, I know that we all have ideas that sound like they might be worth writing about but then upon further review (by the time we sit down at the computer) we decide for one reason or another that they are not worth doing and no more than maybe the first sentence ever gets written. I’m not talking about those types of posts.
What I’m wondering about here are posts that have actually been somewhat developed and then you decided not to continue it and the world never got to see that work of literature. This happened to me the other day (Tuesday or Wednesday I think it was) and I will use that experience as an example of what I mean. I had an idea for a post and I thought it sounded like a decent post that would perhaps make people think. Over the course of the next 20 minutes or so after I got the idea, I was formulating the post in my mind and when I got to a computer I began working on it.
As I was nearing somewhere around what I felt was going to be the middle of the post, I had about a page of text in a Word document and was about to insert some logic as to why my views were right (or at least made sense) and I realized that I really didn’t agree with what I was saying as much as I thought I did or that my point didn’t make as much sense as I originally thought it would. At this point I sat for several minutes trying to decide if I could salvage the post or if there was someway that I might still be able to make it worth doing and ended up scrapping the whole thing.
I know this isn’t the first time this has happened to me, but it doesn’t seem to very often. With the number of posts that get published in the blogosphere on a given day, I would think that statistically there should be a significant number of posts that this happens to…unless we all just post a bunch of crap regardless if we should post it or not.
Note: This post was inspired because this just happened to me for the second time this week, however I didn’t have near as much written this time (only about 2 paragraphs with a bunch more in my head) and the idea was scrapped for moderately different reasons. What I thought was going to be a nice and constructive post was turning into a bash session and I thought it might be better to rethink posting it. As I was re-thinking it, the idea for this post came in to my head 
RSS feed
| Trackback URI
| 
Send To A Friend
This happens to me ALOT actually. My thoughts get all mixed up so my post gets all mixed up and all I am left with is a post that sounds like shit.
*I* know wtf i am talking about. but to someone else, they are going to be left wondering why did i publish crap.
If i posted half the crap that comes to my mind, people would think I am weird(er).
So how do you decide whether to try and fix the post or to just delete it and move on to a new topic?
Well what I do is set it aside and come back to it. I keep it as a word doc. I leave it alone til i want to come back to it and see how i can save it. Usually after a few days (or weeks) i come back with a fresh thoughts about it and it comes out sounding alot better than the first go round.
Unpublished stuff accounts for about 45% of everything I write. Sometimes I wonder
if it’s possible to resurrect a post but, more often than not, an abandoned post is
90% unrecyclable
I would say about 98% of whatever I write is published. I have close to 500 published posts and only 3 drafts of incomplete posts so I’m just a super over achiever. Its been my goal in life apparently but yeah I usually complete a post once I start it!
Most of the time, once I have begun writing a post I finish it. What usually happens to me though, is I’ll spend twenty or thirty minutes researching something, just to decide I don’t want to write a post about it after all.
This happens at least once a week and can be a little frustrating.
I have 3 in my drafts.. but that happened when I got stuck mentally and wasn’t sure if I should publish them..
this always happen on me… getting blank and having lots of things in mind, I do create lots of items for future events..
I always have lots of things in mind, just most of my thoughts wouldn’t make very good blog posts. I do go blank on post ideas quite often though…I don’t mind those two situations as much as the ones where I get the post half written before deciding that it’s no good.