By James Wallace Harris, Wednesday, January 20, 2016

This is my 1,000th blog post and I’ve learned a lot from blogging.

My first post was “Access time in a fifty-five year old brain” published 12/26/2006. Here’s the first paragraph:

The main reason I’ve created this blog is to help me remember. After that I want to study how information is organized with the ultimate plan of taming the horde of competing topics that have tangled up my synapses. I’m hoping if I can find a way to organize my thoughts I will be able to remember facts and details more efficiently and faster. If I can’t, then the search box will do the job my neurons can’t. My access time for my gray matter runs from instant, to many hours, to total failure. This started as a noticeable problem in my late forties and has been getting worse ever since.

Well, I’m still struggling to organize my thoughts, but I’m quite confident Auxiliary Memory has been an huge help as an external memory device. Blogging is also a form of mental exercise that keeps my declining mind in shape. After nine years, or 3,314 days, and over a million words, I have forgotten most of what I’ve written, but it’s still there for me to retrieve. I’m often surprised to reread what I write. Blogging has turned out to be an incredibly useful tool, and I wonder why more people don’t blog.

To celebrate these nine hundred and ninety-nine essays, I thought I’d note some of what I’ve learned.

Blogging is like piano practice for writing. Essay writing is a concrete way to organize thoughts. Original thoughts are thin and vague, and it takes a lot of work to make them coherent. Often coherency doesn’t show up until days of writing and rewriting. We don’t realize how unclear our thoughts are until we try to put thoughts into sentences. Thinking improves with editing. The quality of my writing is directly related to the number of times I reread and edited an essay before I hit the publish button. There is no relation between getting hits and what I’m interested in writing about. I can’t predict what people will want to read. The old essay that gets the most current hits is “Do You Dream About Dinosaur Attacks?” If you search Google for “Dreaming about dinosaurs” my piece is 2nd in their listing. Evidently 30-50 people a day research this topic. I never would have predicted that. If my goal is to get hits, then I should review products. Product reviews are my consistent hit getters, but I quit writing them. Science fiction is the subject that has garnered my most readers, and my favorite topic to write about. Don’t expect your friends and family to read your blogs. Only a few of my friends have subscribed to my blog and will occasionally mention reading an essay, or post a reply. I’ve learn to write what I feel like writing and not to worry if it will be read. I’m currently getting 250-350 hits a day, mostly due to Google searches, but also because of a handful of regular readers. I have 1,500 subscribers. But I can’t assume that a hit means a read. Just because a person clicks on a Google search return doesn’t mean I’m providing them with information they want to know. And many of my subscribers are other bloggers hoping I’ll read their blog. (Which I do try to do.) It’s extremely hard to write a 1,000 words that someone else will want to read. Few people want to think about a specific topic the same time that I do. There are very few people that have the same mixture of interests as I do. Blogging is a way to embed your personality into words. Blogging is a way to find out how many of your friends, family, and strangers think your interests are interesting. Blogging is a way to express yourself without boring your friends. If you want to find out how interesting you are to your friends, blog your thoughts. You might be surprised. There is a direct relationship between how much time my friends are willing to listen to me talk and whether or not they will read what I’ve written. My most chatty friends, the ones that never let me get a word in, never read my blog. I don’t say this as a hurt ego, but to show that blogging will reveal which of your friends are actually interested in what’s going inside of your head. Don’t blog if you don’t want to know. Blogging will reveal what your true interests are to yourself, and how fanatical you are about them. Blogging is a good way to meet people like yourself online. Blogging is a good way to learn if you have common interests or obscure fascinations. Blogging is a way to learn when your thinking is faulty. Blogging is a way to learn when your thinking is political incorrect. Blogging is a way to learn things about yourself that you don’t see – because readers do. Blogging is a way to test the limits of your memory. If you blog about a past event and try to document it with photos, outside reference material, interviews with people at the event, you’ll learn that memories are piss-poor at best. A well written blog about an event written within 24 hours will provide a better memory than your brain. If you get an idea for a blog post start writing it as soon as possible because the idea will disappear quickly. Blogging is mostly memory, opinions and reporting. Reporting is when you document events outside of yourself. Being a good reporter is hard. Opinions are a dime a million, essentially worthless unless you can back them up with evidence. The more evidence the better. My personal memories are only interesting to people if I can frame them in a universal theme. And even then, few people will read them. One of my favorite memory-lane pieces, “Super Men and Mighty Mice” has gotten the least amount of hits. It was about being kids and pretending to fly, and begins like this:

During the Ozzie and Harriet years, when I was seven and people called me Jimmy, my sister Becky and our best friends Mikey and Patty, would beg old tattered terry cloth towels from our moms and pretend to be George Reeves. We’d tie those old faded pastel rags around our necks, stretch out our arms, hands flat, fingers pointing forward, tilt our heads down and run like Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, occasionally jumping with all our might, with the hopes of getting airborne like Superman, or at least Mighty Mouse. And when we were burnt out and our little bodies too tired to try any more, we’d go to sleep at night and have flying dreams. It’s hard to write Jean Shepherd type nostalgia and get hits. Shepherd is famous for A Christmas Story. Nostalgia just doesn’t index well on Google. Nostalgia does appeal to readers who have similar past experiences. It’s lucky when you find those people, or they find you. Blogging teaches elements of journalism. If you want hits, you have to write what other people want to read. That means focusing on current popular topics, and writing short pieces that don’t exceed the common attention span. I decided long ago to write what I’m interested in and at lengths longer than most people want to read. So it goes. I’ve learned that I naturally think in 500-1500 word essays. 500-1500 words is far longer than what most people want to read. Titles are very important. Delete all the words that people will skim over. I’m a verbose writer and don’t delete enough. Over the years I’ve often written about topics I’ve already written about but have forgotten that did. I have common themes I repeat but I hope are refined with each new approach. Regular blogging helps with my writing and thinking skills. Regular blogging helps with my verbal skills. This was a real revelation. Regular blogging keeps my vocabulary active. If I don’t blog for a week or two I start forgetting words, and forget how to pronounce them. That old saying, “Use it or lose it” is true. Blogging has been a great social outlet since I retired. I can express myself better in a blog than I can talking. Blogging helps me listen to other people. Blogging makes me wish my friends blogged so I could read their thoughts. Blogging makes me wish my friends blogged so they would make their thoughts more coherent. Blogging is somewhat like being in a hive mind. I wished I had started blogging when I learned to read and write. I wished I had learned to read and write at age 4, when I started being self-aware. I wished my parents, grandparents, and ancestors had blogged so I could read about their inner lives. I wish the Library of Congress would archive blogs. I wish politicians, famous people and people doing interesting jobs would blog. Sound bites on television makes people seem shallow, tweets make them seem snarky, and Facebook makes them seem silly. Everyone approaches blogging differently. Some people use it like a diary, making short notes about their day. Others post photographs of all the places they visit. Some people repost other people’s blogs that they like. Some people write excessively about tiny topics, or say essentially nothing about big topics. There’s no one way to blog. Folks want to read about your dreams about as much as they want to see your vacation photos. Sometimes you have to guess what you remember. In recent years many writers have gotten into trouble for writing nonfiction that turned out to be fiction. Memory is closer to fiction than nonfiction. That’s just how it is. Wikipedia is my absolute best memory bank. Google makes a great spelling tool and dictionary. Sometimes I have to play Six Degrees of Separation to remember a person. IMDb is great tool for that. I’ve learn to fact-check my memory. I always try to send friends my blog when I mention them, but most people don’t care. I generally get photos from Google and use them without credit. I shouldn’t do that. I do try to get generic photos, or things in public domain. Sometimes people use my posts and photos without credit. Sometimes I think it’s flattery, other times I think fraud. Blogging is good for my mental health. Blogging gives me a sense of purpose after I retired. Blogging is a way to examine my life – remember an unexamined life is not worth living. Blogging is a way to be philosophical. Blogging is a way to push myself to do more.

JWH