Celebration: 100th Post
I am astonished and excited to announce that this is my 100th post on this website.
Over 2 years ago I set myself the task of building my own website. I am immeasurably proud of myself for achieving that and humbled by how much I still don’t know.
Ostensibly, I built this thing because I wanted to take my writing forward, to create a portfolio, to be able to show the world look I can write.
Those were the justifications. But really, I built the website, and I continue to post on it, because what I wanted was a space to talk about books. To rant about the ones that annoyed me. To rave about books that blew my mind, that have excavated themselves a place in my soul. To do so without interruptions, without that what is this person going on about look.
People complain the blog is dead. I say those are people who never wanted to blog in the first place. If the blog is dead then Substack wouldn’t be a thing. Then people would not be paying subscriptions to The New Yorker (actually they probably would, but you get my point).
I don’t write the blog for them. I write it for me.
Doing this work, showing up to this blog has done incredible things for my writing. It has given me the space to find my voice. But it’s more than that. A hundred articles later it has reinforced my voice. It has taught me an enormous amount about my ‘process’. What conditions I need to best put a well developed argument onto the page. Editing, nobody teaches you how to edit your writing. But trying to find an argument out of 3000 words worth of incoherent fury teaches you a lot about stepping back and analysing your own work (there is literally an upcoming article that started like this).
But, I think, more than anything, what I have learned from this blog is how to think about books. How to sit back and consider the work after the first flush of enjoyment. Because in asking what I liked and hated, I have each time learned something new about what makes good, compelling writing.
If you want to be a good writer you need to be a reader
I would add one small but essential caveat. Read, then THINK about what you have read. Why this book affected you the way it did. Put it into words. Then take that knowledge forward into the next draft.
The blog is a teacher. But it is also a record.
The internet is written in ink
I have read back over old posts and wondered about the person who wrote those words. I have looked at what I said about a book, at the ways it touched me, and I have seen in that all the ways I have changed as a person. That is a record I can’t burn, a me I can’t deny was there. That is kind of humbling and precious.
Maybe what I was looking for was a place to speak uninterrupted. A place to be heard.
In this draft as in many of my others, I didn’t discover what I was trying to say till I got to the end. The blog is only dead if you allow it to be.
If nothing else it is an active act of practising your craft every week, come family implosions, health crises, or unemployment. It is a place to develop your voice and your craft.
It is a place for you.
