The Snake Eating Its Tail
I love Robin Sloan’s emails. The newsletter will come to an end soon–he promised that in the beginning of the project–but for the time being, he either points out interesting things or makes interesting statements. I don’t mind because it’s more about what he shares vs. the writer himself.
In one of the September newsletters, he talked about this concept of building the end into the beginning. He writes:
There are all these people starting email newsletters suddenly, and I’m glad! It’s good! That said, I hope some of them have considered ahead of time how their newsletters might end. Every internet project is sorta by default open-ended, and I don’t think that’s healthy.
His recommendation is to treat every project as you would a book: beginning, middle, end. You know when a book is complete. You can feel good, knowing you wrote the story across the finish line.
A blog, on the other hand, is an amorphous beast. You either keep writing it forever––this blog is over 13 years old––or you fade away, sometimes without a goodbye. But very few people start a blog and say on the first post how long they’ll write–and then end it when they say they will. Still, with no edge to bump against, how do you know when you’ve accomplished something?
I don’t look at this blog as a project. I look at it as an online home; a space where I live on the Internet. But I’ve been chewing his words as a reader. Would I start reading a blog (not a newsletter) if I knew the blog was going to end? Would I be more likely to skip it because part of blogging is becoming attached to the voice and the writer–not the plotline?
I don’t know. Would you start reading a blog if the person said in the first post, “This blog will be completed on X date” or “This blog will end after X happens”?
3 comments
Hmmm….I think it would depend. A blog about X sort of experience (e.g. blogging my expat experience) has a sort of natural end point. As you can tell from my (sadly neglected) blog, my attitudes about blogging date to the pseudonymous blogging era and I’m drawn to personal stories and connecting with bloggers (or at least blogger personas/and commenters). I don’t think an end time would be more or less attractive….it would mostly depend on how attractive I found the project and voice. How’s that for a waffling answer?
I think I would. I mean, when I see HBO has a miniseries vs a series-series. I still watch if the subject matter is appealing to me. I kinda like know the investment will one day end and my attention can go elsewhere without missing anything.
Hmm. Even though I never really thought about it, and never expressly said it, I think that there was an understanding regarding my blog that it would end when/if we resolved our infertility by completing our family. And that’s pretty much what happened.
My observation of the many, many other bloggers I used to read when I was still “in the trenches” of infertility is that the vast majority stopped blogging at that point. And I think I always understood that would happen, so yes, I would obviously follow blogs if I knew that they would end at a certain point.