Why do I go on blogging breaks so often?

Sometimes,  blogging slows down because of unavoidable reasons – work, family or travel interfere.  Other times, what happens is that I get fixated on a particular long post that I want to write. Usually, it is a bad idea for me  to write posts. It is the posts that write themselves.  So, when this long post refuses to write itself, I end up writing a few lines every day, with the result that a few days later, I think that the post is a complete mess, and needs to be rewritten. The prospect daunts me, and I don’t have time. So, I am stuck in a loop.

The worst is when a combination of the two reasons happen. Work forces me into a reasonably long break, and then I decide that when I come back, my first post just has to be about some recent event – like the elections, Article 377, or about Manmohan Singh’s capitulation in Egypt, or something. Then the post refuses to write itself, and I am stuck in another loop, and then another event occurs that absolutely has to be written about.

The solution is to first, get out of the topicality trap. I may write about the elections or article 377, but it will be when I choose to. If my post on the election is worth reading, it will be worth reading even if I write it a year after the election. Second, I should adopt the Fire and Motion strategy.  As long as I keep writing some short post every day, The Examined Life will maintain the momentum and the longer posts will write themselves.

Or, the second point may backfire – I may keep writing the short posts and never write the long one. But at any rate, I don’t see how things can be worse than these long shutdowns of my blog.