The Bypass

Paul Graham Raven:

Responding to the revelation that one of his friends does book-binding as a hobby, and has started a newsletter in order to have somewhere to talk about that, Paul addresses what in some ways has been the perpetual lament of the blogger, ever since blogging was a thing: why don’t I have as much mojo for this as I feel like I should have?

It took me a long while, but I found my bypass for this: I use the best blogging tool in the world, WordPress, but it’s not a blog except in its earliest and rawest terms – a web log. It’s a notebook, and you keep logs in a notebook.

“Though not private memoirs, and not quite public histories, zibaldoni were considered important containers of culture. Florentines took the transmission of their written culture as seriously as they did the transmission of the family name from one generation to the next.”

A blog comes with the suggestion of a certain commitment: the blog is essayistic now, and that requires energy. Mojo. And when you already write for a living, that energy is mostly going elsewhere. A notebook is a thing you pick up when you need to make a note, and you may not pick it up for days at a time. The commitment with a notebook is simply keeping it at hand all the time.

The big shift for me was in deciding this is a notebook. And the pleasure of using WordPress is that it can make pretty much any kind of note that I need with very little friction. I’m probably bending the intent of WordPress a little, but tools are there to be tested.

So, yeah, sometimes I’ll go a few days without making a note, and then I’ll log four things I need to remember in a row on a Friday afternoon.

Now, if I had the mojo, I’d follow the brush. But I’m making this note in a pause between sections of script, and the script is where the energy needs to be today. Tomorrow may be different. Nothing to lament over.