The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Respect Readers, Take Yourself Seriously (2024-01-01)

Workboot image by pen_ash via pixabay from pen_ash's free for use collection, july 2022.

With the four hundred fiftieth thoughtpiece rapidly approaching and other long term projects finally getting finished and posted, plus the recent twentieth birthday of The Moonspeaker, I have been thinking about writing and the principles I apply to it as a practice. Practically speaking there are just three of them, two of which are noted in the title of this thoughtpiece. The first one is simply that as a writer, you have to start somewhere. It has always fascinated me how often a preliminary beginning has been enough to get things going, with no need to even keep it. Indeed, it is usually worth just deleting that preliminary bit. A physical analogy is something like being a bit resistant to heading out to take a walk, even though you enjoy it, so you decide to do some walk-like things at least like taking out the trash and vacuuming, and by the end of that actually, you;re ready for getting outside and stretching your legs for an hour or so. Which all suggests that writing is like any exercise or art, a person needs to warm up a bit before really getting down to business. For myself at least, writing and walking do go together, in that a great deal of planning and structural revising gets done when I am off on a long walk primarily to exercise. When I head out for an afternoon of errand-running, there are too many distractions for me to do writing work as well, although it is true that neat ideas or solutions for annoying issues may pop to conscious mind out of wherever my subconscious has been working at them. My current walking shoes are not quite as worn as the workboots in the illustration, being relatively new, but they'll get there.

The other principle is to respect readers, and when it comes to this website, human site visitors whether they spend much time reading or not. The other non-human visitors, from bots to crawlers to indexers, I basically ignore them for the most part. Search engine optimization is a game that can still be played to great effect, algorithms aside. I am aware of a blogger who is incredibly proud of how his blog is in the top twenty five percent for reach, that it costs him no money, and part of that is he writes content for the search engines to pick up. The flip side of achieving this though, besides free hosting with all the risk that type of "free" entails, is his observation that this means he must write roughly eighty percent of the time on topics he is not personally interested in. To my ear, that does not sound even remotely free. This blogger does not just write the awful marketing-text style of post, the kind of post where one paragraph is divided by sentence into pseudo-paragraphs to make it easy to insert advertisements. There is no reason for him to since he is running the site using services that don't cost money, avoiding the perverse incentive to accept advertising. He is thoughtful, up front about his approach and how others could mimic it, and generally I have found even his technical articles avoid the unhappy tone that highly skilled computer administrators can slip into when they need to explain something that has become second nature to them. That is an important skill it can be easy to miss is there. I appreciate learning about this approach, in order to think through consciously whether I would like to follow it in future. I really don't think I would, though.

Instead, part of my way of respecting the reader over time is seeking to write actual paragraphs, and writing in several different forms. Hence there are essays and shorter pieces for the non-fiction side of things, including my effort to do some webmaster resource provision in the form of the essay on writing an rss feed. On the fiction side there are works by others that I've annotated, plus my own stories, some short stories, even a couple of novels (one still in progress). There's a very old draft of a creative non-fiction book as well, which I hope to finally post the updates to this year after an astonishingly long delay. My own take on the old-fashioned links page is there in the form of the Previous Random Sites of the Week page, which collects up the websites featured in the "Random Site of the Week" corner on the home page. At some point soon I need to rework the page into some loose categories, but in the meantime rather than just throwing a linked title up for each one, I try to give two or three useful sentences of description. When I am really lucky, there is an especially good place to start to get into the site besides the random site's own main page. By this I don't mean any criticism of the main pages at all, they are generally excellent. It's just that a wonderful random site is often very rich, with many pages to explore and get to know. I usually find my way to them via a search result or recommendation for a specific page, so it strikes me as worth sharing that fruitful starting point along with the main website address. A person may then select whichever of the two they prefer. One thing I may finally do is add an optional version of the link that will open in a new window or tab. I have debated making that the default behaviour, but this a behaviour I don't like myself when browsing websites if it is not something I have triggered. On the other hand, not everyone has memorized the key command that achieves the same result whether or not the link is set to behave that way, and the mouse gestures to do it may be difficult for physical reasons affecting the person or the pointing device. So it seems to me the most respectful approach will be adding that optional version of the link.

Now, the third principle I use is to take myself seriously as a writer, but don't worry, not too seriously. Otherwise the first principle of starting somewhere would be rendered ineffective. But that begs the question of what I mean by seriously then. For me it means not chasing the latest media sensation to write about, instead sticking to writing about what genuinely interests me. Otherwise I would be spending precious time producing text that I couldn't care enough about to edit, let alone update and make additions to improve source citations and rectify cases where I feel a title is not accurate and needs correction. Journalists and bloggers who are able to write across a wild range of topics regardless of personal interest impress me with their ability to do so. I am not that disciplined however, and the odd time I've tried, usually for a specific work or academic assignment, the results definitely show I was struggling to do more than dial it in. Just dialling it in on purpose without rectifying the situation goes against the respecting the reader principle, too. It's interesting how just starting somewhere doesn't feel at all like dialling it in – for a technical simile, I'd say it is more akin to a modem, where the modem facilitates making the connection, then supports the data flow. The other part of taking being a writer seriously, but not too seriously, is making sure to keep reading diverse things and learn more about writing. If I have no prompts to start somewhere from, then things get stuck pretty fast. As many pieces on The Moonspeaker show, varied reading has blessed me with many prompts!

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