Blogging Motivation: What's That?

I think we’re supposed to be writing about how we bloggers stay motivated when blogging, but I think a much more relatable topic for the masses is how we definitely, positively don’t stay motivated.

For me, if I’m not motivated, I don’t write a blog post. (Or upload videos to YouTube, as I’m currently doing.) It’s that simple. I feel no obligation to regularly bestow my vast wisdom upon the populace.

I mentioned this before: Blogging is hard, unrewarding, mostly wasted work. There are only two rewards for most people: 1) The self-satisfaction of publishing a blog post, and 2) If someone happens to discover your blog post five years later and learns something. I, myself, am usually writing for that person who finds my posts five years from now. (Which might be me.)

So sometimes I just don’t write blog posts. In fact, most of the time I don’t write blog posts. Which is fine. Not posting a blog post is way better than posting a terrible blog post, if anyone were to ask me.

The usual caveats apply if, for example, you have to post something because it’s your job, or you’ve somehow managed to eek out some money from writing a blog. But to me, a monetized blog always seems like an ever-growing house of cards, waiting to collapse at any moment. Work, in other words.

Anyway morning is over already and I haven’t even made any coffee yet so bye.

Some time later

But wait! It turns out I can’t do a single thing about the catastrophic failures happening at work this morning, so I can write a few more words here.

Blaugust is a bit of an unusual circumstance because it forces me to write and publish something even if I think it’s terrible. This post, for example, is terrible. I would never publish this post in a million years outside of a “writing challenge” event.

I write a lot of half-finished blog posts that are terrible. I’ve probably started writing 50 blog posts so far in Blaugust. All terrible. Maybe they can be salvaged, but probably not. I’ve lost interest in all 50 of them anyway. I see one over there on the sidebar of my text editor cleverly titled “new-gaming-post copy 2.md.” What am I supposed to do with that?*

Sometimes I try to pull out half-finished posts and edit them so they aren’t terrible, but that’s a lot of time-consuming work. Blogging isn’t supposed to be work, because there’s no real compensation for doing it, other than a finely-crafted blog post, so I tend to throw posts away rather than try to fix the terrible ones.

Incidentally, the main thing that will cause me to throw away a post is not having a solid conclusion. If a blog post doesn’t have a point it’s a candidate for throwing away. Every blog post must make a point, or answer a question, or relate a specific piece of knowledge. Ones like this, which are just kind of rambling about nothing to fill space, almost always go in the trash bin unless it’s Blaugust.

Because I’ve said nothing yet about either a) how to stay motivated, or b) why I’m not always motivated, and therefore this post conveys no useful information.

I suppose the main idea that I wanted to convey here is that if you’re not motivated to blog, you’re not alone, and also don’t worry about it. Which could have been said in a single sentence, apparently. Twitter is a good place for a lot of one-sentence blog posts, actually.

On a related note, I’ve thrown more than one blog post into the garbage bin of history because I couldn’t find a topical picture for it. It’s always better to not post a blog post than to post a blog post without a picture. This could be one of those. I guess I’ll just use a generic “blogging” picture.

* In a surprise twist, it turns out I already posted new-gaming-post copy 2.md.