Avoiding the Hamlet Syndrome in Blogging

Are you a blogger with a growing pile of draft posts--just awaiting the polish that your thoughts deserve before getting launched? This is my predicament, accounting for the fact that weeks go by, at times, between posts. It isn't that I haven't been thinking or writing; it's that I have the Hamlet Syndrome: over thinking things and so not taking action (hitting that publish button). When the hapless prince of Denmark saw a neighboring prince taking an army to go kick some butt, he chided himself for his "craven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on the event." Hamlet would not have been a good blogger. A good lurker, yes, but I know the difference between sampling broadly and keeping oneself out of the game. I've chosen to be in the game. Now it's a matter of keeping myself there by fighting the polish-or-perish inertia that academia has instilled in me.

The irony here is that I have been a critic of academic discourse precisely because its laborious process of review and its schedule of months or years from submission to publication lacks the intellectual liquidity that is among the chief values of web communication (see my previous post, "Intellectual Liquidity and Academic Impedence"). Academics constantly censor themselves because they have been conditioned to believe their ideas aren't valuable until in a long, finished, official form. That profound misconception is one I do not myself wish to become prey to even in the relatively speedier venue of a blog. It's so funny that this would be an issue for me, a digital evangelist, but it attests to deep-seated habits of expression.

So I am taking measures to do more blogging and less backlogging of my ideas. After all, I am philosophically committed to publishing "early and often" (drawing this concept from Agile Software Deveopment, certainly not from academic publishing). Get those ideas out there where they can start generating feedback so you can make your thought stream a living, responsive thing! So here are some steps I plan to use:

1. Write shorter posts
2. Post many times weekly, rather than a few times montly.
3. Post from my iPhone.

That third point is crucial, I think. The limits of the keyboard plus the fact that the phone is always with me (so I'm in the middle of many things) means I just can't spend the four hours I have sometimes used on polishing a post. This post, for example, I am writing during my son's cello class while I listen to Happy Farmer--a snappy little tune suggesting that making things grow has something to do with the alacrity with which one goes about it.

I'd like to explore the idea of figuring out the utility of various lengths and types of blog posts, but to keep myself from the Hamlet Syndrome today I'd better save that for another time... 

Comments

[Candy]

Great post! I have about 10 or so drafts awaiting my attention. One of the things I've noticed is that not only does it have to do with time availability, but there's also this timed window of opportunity where the inspiration and meaning attached to my thoughts can be solidified. And if I wait too long its like they expire and the initial idea fizzles. I need to be more diligent as well. (And I need to not let myself feel like FB counts as connecting with the bloggersphere.)

[Jon Ogden]

I can relate to this, as sometimes I'll get hung up and spend 6-8 hours on a post, and then still go back through it and weed stuff out before I finally make it public.

I'm trying to streamline the process a bit more, but I still worry that my already fragile ethos will be shot if I don't iron out my arguments carefully. I mean, people are busy and I don't know how patient they'll be to read through drafts that are terribly rough.

But perhaps consistency is more important than perfectly packaged arguments?

[Stephanie]

I suffered from the same thing: I'd spend 4-5 hours on a post, and then feel backlogged because I wasn't publishing anything. New ideas would get stifled because I didn't let myself spend time with those until the original posting was done.

But then my daughter was born. Now, I'm lucky if I get 30 minutes per day at the computer.(*) This forces me to be concise. I no longer achieve the depth I once had in my blog postings. But this is good, to an extent, because my research is at a point where I'm following lots of trails and forks-in-the-road, and at this early stage I believe it is beneficial for my work to be forced not to dive too deep in a particular direction.

(*) Except now that she's started daycare, I am able to claim more computer time again...!