Every November, as if bloggers didn’t face enough pressure in keeping up with their sites, some take on the challenge known as ‘NaBloPoMo.’ I’m not one of them.
I just stumbled on a reference to something called NaBloPoMo, a mashup of an abbreviation for a monthlong observance devoted to blogging. It stands for National Blog Posting Month. The premise seems simple enough: Bloggers are expected to post something on their blog on a daily basis.
The idea isn’t all that new. The WordPress.com blog posted about it 15 years ago back in 2009. That post mentioned that the organizers of the annual observance would issue a theme for the month. I don’t know if they still do that. I never signed up to begin with.
NaBloPoMo is offshoot of equally bad idea for writers
I suspect that a similar idea, NaNoWriMo, came first. That stands for National Novel Writing Month. The idea there is that you write a 50,000-word novel, one day at a time, through the month of November.
Both share one central premise: You write something every day. No matter what. I attempted to write a novel years ago. It’ll never see the light of day, believe me. At times, I made myself write with that same “no matter what” spirit.
Even if I knew what I was writing was crap or wouldn’t work, I kept writing. You can easily imagine the quality of the final product.
It wouldn’t have taken an edit. Even a “rewrite” wouldn’t do justice to the atrocity I produced in the name of writing something no matter what. Justice would require a massive bonfire to consume every page and every note of the garbage I committed to paper and a stack of virgin legal pads on which I would start the process over again from scratch.
Post every single day? Been there, done that
A thing like NaBloPoMo accomplishes a couple of things. The first of which, if you’re lucky, is a sense of discipline. It takes a lot of effort and commitment to post something on your blog every single day.
It can be maddening. I should know, after all. For six-and-a-half years, I posted something every day here at Patrick’s Place. I didn’t set out with such an ambitious goal in mind. I just got into some sort of weird blogging rhythm where I felt I had enough to say that I was able to write a post, then write a second and a third. Instead of posting all three in the same day, I posted one and scheduled the others over the next few days. As new ideas came, I scheduled them ahead.
Sometimes, the ideas would slow and I’d burn through my advance posts and then I’d have to struggle to come up with a “next” post. Other times, I’d turn out a couple of extra posts and end up a week ahead or more. (Those were nice days.)
But trust me: There were plenty of not-so-nice days. That brings me to the second thing something like NaBloPoMo can produce: a genuine lack of quality.
I had been posting daily for months before it actually dawned on me that I was intentionally posting every day. But once I realized I had gone for such a long stretch, stubbornness kicked in. I refused to miss a day because I didn’t want to break the streak.
I once saw an interview with the late David Brinkley, a longtime journalist. The interviewer asked him about cable television and Brinkley complained about the sheer number of channels it brought.
“When there are so many outlets, so many broadcast channels, it’s inevitable that many of them be poor quality,” he said.
The same goes for posting something every single day. Sooner or later, the pressure to post something beats the pressure to post something of quality.
I never set out to post something of lesser quality
Anytime I set out to post something, I set out to make it the best it can be. Even when I was posting daily, that was true. But because I wanted to make each post a “gem,” I put that much more pressure on myself. That pressure, sooner or later, burns you out as a writer.
Some of us can get ourselves out of that burnout quickly.
For me, the best way I could knock out most of that burnout was to do something drastic: I had to stop the insanity of daily posting and adjust my posting schedule. I went from seven days a week to the four days I now post.
I wish I could tell you that I now always have posts scheduled in advance. More than anything, I wish I could honestly say that I now have a better sense that every post is a “gem.”
Every post I write isn’t a “gem.” It wasn’t then and it isn’t now. I go back and look at old posts — and after 20 years of this blog, there are many — and find plenty of things to cringe about.
But I don’t cringe so much for me but for my readers. I feel regret of letting something like that get published to begin with.
So that’s why I don’t participate in NaBloPoMo. That’s why I never will.
When I need something that outrageous just to keep posting, I think I’ll have run out of things to say. That, to me, would be all the more reason to hang up the keyboard.
I never tried it because I knew I would hate doing it. I don’t want to “have to” do something like that.