How guest blogging ruined my blog

Actually, it’s not so much that guest blogging ruined the blog itself…rather, it ruined my ability to blog. And the problem is not that I allowed some friend, or stranger, to write something unworthy on my own blog. The problem came when I wrote something for another organization’s blog.

Why would this be a problem? Was it because the piece I wrote was so badly written that my reputation was ruined forever? Did I write something so controversial or offensive that Blogspot banned me from my own blog? Did my advisor find my guest post and tell me I’d better stop blogging if I wanted to graduate?

No, not at all. The trouble was this: my guest post was just too good. Well, that might be overstating it…let’s be accurate. I don’t know whether it was any good or not, but I’m certain I spent way too much time editing it. It was my first go at writing something for an established audience, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself (or my university or my advisor). So I spent quite a bit of time on it. I even hauled it to my professor’s Friday night writing group for feedback. (I thought they might enjoy a break from the usual academic menu…methods sections of dissertations can be a bit dry.) Yes, indeed, I shared my grad school failure/drifter story with a bunch of professors. What was I thinking? I still don’t know the answer to that, but I do know their critique improved it tremendously.

By the time my guest post finally posted, it had almost become a pet, and I was rather proud of it. I liked my little story, and thought it a pretty respectable first effort for a rookie writer. I fully intended to submit a couple more guest posts over the summer. Unfortunately, the pains I took perfecting my first post doomed the rest of them. My other guest posts don’t exist. I started them, spent a few sessions editing them, but never finished them. They were okay, but they didn’t seem to have as much life as the original one, so I stopped.

So what? If I never wrote another guest blog for an actual audience, wouldn’t that be okay? Sure. Except that my perfectionism-induced paralysis extended to my own blog. The whole point of this blog was to motivate myself to write on my dissertation. When I found myself spending five consecutive days editing a building description, I realized something had gone terribly wrong. I could justify spending a few hours each month blogging, trusting it would spike my motivation and give me some much-needed writing practice. But I couldn’t justify hours spent editing commas and finding synonyms on Visual Thesaurus.

So, since my blog posts couldn’t be perfect, I quit writing them. This is just my second blog post in the last two months. Now admittedly, the last three weeks of my blogging hiatus are partly due to the fact that I finally started data collection (hooray!), and I’ve spent the last three weeks visiting classes and wading through piles of consent forms. Still, I managed to find a little time for recreational writing—I just didn’t post anything because it wasn’t good enough.

Well, absence brings perspective. I missed my little blog, so I’m back. And I’m back with a new resolve: In the future, I will post my spontaneous ramblings for all to see, and save my perfectionism for my dissertation.

Important notes/disclaimers: This blog post was written, edited, and posted in a single writing session. This blog post was created in fulfillment of my “Next Session Writing Goal” I committed to last night: “Write and post a blog entry”. From now on, I will devote no more than two (2) writing/editing sessions to a single blog post.