Hi! I’m back.
I haven’t posted on WordPress in about 2 weeks, and this is my explanation blog post as to why.
(I hate doing this because I hate excuses and this seems like an excuse post. I’m going to write it anyway, but please understand that this is an explanation, not an excuse.)
I am a writer. It’s in my blood. My grandpa is a writer, and so is my dad. I grew up loving to write and read and edit, so much so that most of my hobbies revolved around those three things. I have had internships at publishing houses/writing workshops/magazines since the start of high school, and I major in writing at college. I’ve talked about this with my friend Vivian, who has a similar mindset and who studied marketing and journalism at college, and we agreed that no matter where we go in life and no matter where our career paths go, we will always be writers. Basically, writing is my passion, and it will always be a part of my identity. (I say these types of things a lot, FYI.)
And in all honesty I’m pretty good at it. I have to have some sort of confidence in my abilities otherwise I wouldn’t be here, right?
I started this WordPress last summer because I wanted a more serious place to post my writing that wasn’t Tumblr or my Facebook cover photo caption. My writing as in, writing that was my own, writing that was personal and meant something to me. Flash fiction, poetry (which I don’t write as much anymore and have kind of grown to resent), personal essays, features, whatever. I didn’t write on it consistently. I used it to write about stuff I remembered and was important to me and how things made me feel, which really helped me understand myself and my writing better.
I just looked back in my archives, and my first post was about going home from my internship at Random House and seeing this boy draw portraits of people on the subway. I didn’t post again for several weeks, but just knowing that WordPress was there for me when I needed it to be, when I needed to take a breather from writing academic essays and reading dense books at school and write something real, was a comfort.
My friend Sabina at school has her own WordPress, and she posts on hers bi-weekly. It has become a sort of job for her, and she takes it really seriously. I look up to her a lot for doing it, because it’s a huge commitment and is time consuming, but she loves it and she works hard on it. She writes all the time for her blog about adventures in her own life and about stuff she’s interested in, and initially, that’s what I wanted to do too.
She inspired me to try and start WordPress-ing more often, and I figured that it would be the next step for me as a writer, so I signed up for Blogging 101. (Which is where I met most of y’all who are reading this, if you are reading this.) Blogging 101 was a lot of fun, but I found it to be incredibly time consuming, even if I enjoyed doing it. I followed a lot of really interesting blogs and met a lot of cool bloggers/blogging friends (Hi guys!), and because of it I focused less on my personal development as a writer and more on networking with other bloggers.
I found that it distracted me from my own blogging goals, which sounds a little bit selfish, but it did. I started a WordPress blog to help figure myself out (hence, the title, Amanda Under Construction) through my writing, and got distracted by other people. At first, I was motivated by the thought that other bloggers were reading what I was writing and actually caring about it. And then that just kind of depressed me. I was writing for other people rather than myself. My blogging/writing slowed to a crawl and then kind of disappeared. Which is where we are now!
I texted Sabina the other day about it.
Me: Do you ever feel inconsistently motivated?Sabina: Yeah, but only in some things… Describe what you’re feeling.Me: I feel like with writing, it’s on and off with me and that shouldn’t be the case because I’m a writer. Like the past 2 weeks I’ve just been “really bummed out” (euphemisms, am I right?) and now I’m just like throwing up ideas (that was a bad analogy) and I just want to be more consistent with this stuff.Sabina: I find writing anyway even when I’m feeling unmotivated helps. Then I can’t get out of habit.
(And then I kind of stopped texting her about it because it made me feel sad again.) (Also, if you’re wondering, that is exactly how I text.)
I’m getting a little bit off track here. The point of this post is to explain my absence on WordPress, which I’ve already done, and to talk about my new blogging goals.
Basically, I’m going to use this WordPress for myself. I’m not going to queue posts, I’m going to write them as they come to me. I’m not going to obsessively check my reader or tags every 5 minutes on my phone, like I do with Facebook and Snapchat. I figure that I’ll set up a time each week for me to scroll through and read and like and comment on posts that bloggers I follow post. That way I’m not overwhelmed, but I’m still doing what I like to do.
I’m not giving up on you, my blogging friends! ❤ I’m just setting limitations for myself on WordPress. I’ll catch up on responding to comments on my last two posts and responses to your own posts either today or tomorrow. (Those were queued.)
At the end of the day, I write for myself, and this blog is for me. I just kind of forgot that for a while.
Amanda Under Construction 
“At the end of the day, I write for myself, and this blog is for me. I just kind of forgot that for a while.” That is so so important. So long as you’re writing for yourself it doesn’t really matter how often you post. Perhaps you’d prefer to write offline first, one paper even. I still love writing on paper because I often feel more inspired that way, able to cross things out but have them still be there, unlike when you’re writing online.
Blogging 101 will hopefully help with being more consistent but other ways are perhaps thinking of weekly topics you’d like to write about a month in advanced. So in the month you would have written at least 4 blogs.
All the best!
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Thank you! I actually have a few blog posts in the works to put on a queue, but that’s also not my main goal for right now. I like writing on paper, but I also like the permanence of writing on a blog, and the fact that it’s out there for more people to read even though I’m writing for myself. I still find myself writing things down in my little notebooks though, so the ideas are still flowing. 🙂
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Hey Amanda! I completely know how you feel on this one–I think most of us do. You’re not alone! Every few months or so, I find myself needing to step away from blogging for various reasons. It’s the old quality vs. quantity problem… craft great posts infrequently or post many sub-par ones? Don’t feel guilty about needing to step back–we writers all go through this! It’s part of growing. 🙂
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Hey Amelia! I’m just catching up now. Thanks for making me feel better. I think during the school year/when the summer’s over maybe I’ll come up with a more precise blogging schedule and post more consistently, but for right now I need to focus on me. I just needed a break from posting constantly because of Blogging 101. I’m still new at this, after all. Thanks for being so supportive, too. ❤
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I’ve had similar thoughts as well. Blogging 101 made it easy to come on here more often, helped guide our posts, and now it’s on us to decide what we want to blog about. I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to come up with stories on the spot (at least once a week) especially while working a full time job and also writing stories on a different platform. It’s refreshing to hear that I’m not the only one re-evaluating my blog.
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It is pretty difficult to come up with ideas, but it’s also difficult to self motivate without the Blogging 101 e-mails/community notifying me to post, you know? I’m just going to try and do my own thing and use this as my own outlet for now. I’ll keep an eye out for your posts, and I’m glad that we’re kind of on the same page. 🙂
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Paragraphs! *_* LOL.
Welcome back! 😀 Yeah, I totally understand, blogging can be quite the addiction 😥
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Thanks b. 🙂 It’s a big addiction! And very time consuming.
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That’s exactly how I’m going to use mine, don’t worry at all! ❤
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That makes me feel a lot better knowing someone else is doing the same thing! Thanks bb ❤
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Aww ❤
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FYI, not biweekly (that means once every 2 weeks, and holy moly my life would be easy if that’s all I was doing). But I remember how you groaned when I said you had to network to get readers, and I’m glad you gave it a shot and made a few connections but it’s totally okay for you to dial that element back and make it more about you. Networking was one of the things I hated most when I started out, and now I love the community, but your goals were different than mine going in.
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Ooops, yeah I gotta change that. But yeah, this is going to be a different experience for me than for you. Maybe I’ll try it again in the future, but for right now gotta focus on what I want out of this. Ya feel? Love ya.
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