So last year, i.e., 2025, I published a total of …. wait … (drum roll) … 9 blogs. Yaaaayyyyyy.
Yeah, okay, I know it’s not much. But I was just mocking myself for writing 1 blog every 41 days. Well, I wrote more but published less, but who is counting those, right?
And it is not that my blogs are being shortlisted for Pulitzers and whatever writing prizes are out there in the world.
So this made me wonder about my blog writing process. Which, if broken a bit further, is writing, editing, writing, editing, editing, editing, writing, editing, deleting everything, writing, deleting that, then recovering what I had deleted 3 edits ago, then reading, writing, editing, editing, editing… Well, I know you get my point.
The worst part of my entire process is reading what I have written. If it was once or twice, then it is supposedly fine. But reading whatever junk I am writing close to a million times is not fun. Not as fun as writing. Which makes me pity the total number of zero readers that I have there for this blog.
Sometimes I stare at the last sentence I wrote as if I stare long enough at it, I would discover the magic sequence of words in the sentence that would make Hemingway blush. But what do I get after staring at the sequence and looking like a zombie for hours? NOTHING. NAATA. ZERO. No magic sequence. No Hemingway breaking his pen.
Well, Hemingway is to be blamed for this predicament of mine. I read somewhere that he said he rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before he was satisfied. When asked what the problem was, he said, “Getting the words right.”
“Getting the words right”. The “Magic Sequence”!!!
And although he didn’t say, but I do wonder whether he felt that the final combination was right or still was ‘just no right’. Maybe he got bored after trying 39 times. Maybe he thought that now the combination is getting worse rather than getting better. Well, I don’t know whether he felt that way or not. But I do.
For me, after creating drafts after drafts after drafts. I often feel that maybe draft 4 was better than the current draft # 32. And then it makes me feel. UUuuggggghhhhhh.
So I have decided to stop going for the perfect combination and ‘just start writing’. No MS Word. No reading my blogs out aloud. No changing the fonts and background colors to make me wanna read the draft again. Just type my words directly into the blog space here. And read it once (yes, please, allow me to read and edit once. I am not that confident) and then hit Publish.
And I will do this every day. Every single day. What comes out of it? I don’t know. Do I get more readers or less? Although what can be less than 5? I should hardly care.
So the metric right now is ‘A Blog a Day’. Maybe I would still be writing bigger and more nuanced blogs with N to the power of n drafts (where n is the number of words in the blog). And most of these blogs would never get published. But maybe the ones that do get published would make Mr. Pulitzer stand up and notice.
But for now. ‘A blog a day’. And this one for today. Till then
Cheeku Paanta.