Spike Gomes writes:
Why blog?
Not a rhetorical question. I mean why? What’s your motivation?
Short answer: To avoid getting the mental equivalent of blue balls.
Long answer: I’ve just gotta do it.
A couple weeks ago, Johnny Dissidence left this comment:
I Just spent a few hours last night perusing some of the posts you have up on here, and I have to say, I’m impressed by the content and writing skill. Bravo, good sir.
This isn’t the first time, online or off, that someone has complimented my writing talents, and it won’t be the last. Funny thing is, I’ve never FELT like a particularly talented writer. It used to be that whenever someone in real life told me that I was a good writer, I’d joke that the real reason my writing seemed good wasn’t because of any gifts I had, but because everyone else was so bad these days that my mediocre output looked golden in comparison. Think Luke Wilson’s character in Idiocracy. The thought that my scribblings had merit on their own basis was inconceivable to me.
When I was a kid, I was a prolific reader. I was one of those restless boys who was smart enough to read books several levels above everyone else, be they novels or nonfiction, and subsequently couldn’t pay attention to the dumbed-down public school curriculum that I had to endure for six hours a day, five days a week. I got yelled at by my teachers hundreds of times for not paying attention in class, and even managed to get on the bad side of one particularly nasty student teacher who repeatedly confiscated whatever book I was reading at the time, snidely reminding me that “there was a time and a place.” Bitch. My parents, God bless them, resisted any and all attempts the school made to put me on Ritalin, which would have lengthened my attention span at the cost of turning me into one of the drooling zombies the American educational system caters to.
And while I was reading, I was writing. Before I’d even entered middle school, I’d managed to fill up an entire desk with every sort of writing a pre-pubescent mind could put out. Notes from science textbooks, short stories, poems, and more were scribbled on hundreds of looseleaf pages. Aside from a couple of school assignments that my mom has hung onto for posterity, none of it survived to the present day. When I got a new desk in high school, I threw out all of my papers with the old one.
As I aged and hormones started pumping through my body, my pen turned to the usual bathetic teenage drivel. Crap about love, raging against the world for some reason I couldn’t articulate, half-baked philosophical musings that I thought were deep. But along with puberty came an adolescent sense of shame about what I was doing, a warped narcissistic fear about my work being discovered and used to humiliate me. I kept writing, but put it all in an unmarked notebook that I mixed in with my school stuff, which I later burned outright to slake my paranoia. It wasn’t up until I got to college that I worked up the nerve to try and get one of my stories published in the student literary journal, and that was only after my friends egged me on. (I made the cut.) But no matter what happened, the drive to write never died.
In the last decade of his life, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick kept a journal, the Exegesis, in which he documented the various paranormal and religious visions he had and his theories as to their purpose. He was so obsessed with the journal that he spent dozens of sleepless nights writing in it. By the time he died, the Exegesis was thousands of pages long. Some might call him crazy, and he may well have been, but you don’t write an 8,000 page journal unless you’ve got a primal urge to sate. Dick was a man with an itch that he just couldn’t scratch.
That’s why I blog. It’s not something that’s fully enjoyable in the traditional sense, nor is it something that pays. The compulsion to write is an addiction I can’t satisfy, a boulder that I will never roll all the way up the hill. You can’t learn it and you can’t fake it – you’ve either got the urge or you don’t.
When most blogs get barely a couple dozen readers, In Mala Fide has over ten thousand unique visitors a month. When the average blog doesn’t last two months, I’ve been around for well over a year. I won’t deny that I get some validation from having a large amount of people enjoying my work. But as the kid with the desk full of scribblings and the bookshelf full of Beverly Cleary novels could testify, I’d still be doing this even if there was no one to read it.
And I’ll keep doing it until I can’t do it any more.
{ 32 comments… read them below or add one }
I think your traffic success stems from several elements of this blog’s strategy:
1. You’re a connection hub in a niche that lacked one
2. You have a steady high output that’s neither too high nor too fragmented for the niche.
3. Your writing is fairly uncontroversial for the niche.
I think your writing is workmanlike, serviceable, and tends towards the lengthy for my taste.
To increase your blogosphere influence, I don’t think I’d advise any changes in your strategy, except to pack more ideas into fewer words.
Of course, this runs counter to your primary stated objective of avoiding avoid mental blue balls. A perpetual dilemma for the blogger with an itch to scratch… he must needs scratch it in public.
I think you get the tone about right. Not bitter and cranky like The Spearhead. Not verging on truly depraved like Citizen Renegade. And you have a realistic view of women. Americans tend to sentimentalise women, for some reason, and I think your site is a good corrective. Also, no-one in the mainstream media would write like you do, because he wouldn’t keep his job.
You have a unique ability to be liked and respected by your ideological enemies.
Blogging is a compulsion. You can’t not blog. A person either has the compulsion, or not.
Keep it up, Ferd. You are going places.
To me, writing is a stress relief. If I don’t write, I will go crazy. Nothing feels better than to put your thoughts down on paper.
Jim Goad said it best, in “The Redneck Manifesto”-
“If I don’t work I’ll starve. If I don’t write I’ll die.”
You sometimes forget to qualify and add nuance, and you sometimes too easily adopt the talking points of the MRA/MGTOW crowd, but in your best pieces you’re work rises to the level of genuine literature. And I don’t hand out compliments like that lightly.
If you find the right form, you could be canonical writer.
An interesting topic, writers who have published primarily on the net who have real literary value. I can only thing of five:
You
Myself (before I took the blog down)
Roissy
Jim Kalb
Deogolwulf
Rocking posting, rocking blog generally.
This is very much the reason I write, though I have to have a beer or two while I do so. I find writing to be sort of painful, but I find editing what I write to be a hellva good time, and reading what I write makes it all worthwhile. My blog has just recently gotten up to 10,000 hits a month, aso I’m happy that some other people like it, too. It’s just a shame it cannot be our professions.
By the way, I really like your writing, and will be coming back!
FB,
Besides writing with a great flair, you seem to have infinite reserves of patience!!! Especially the weekly edition where you publish links to various posts.
I have ideas but find it very hard to organize them into posts. Indeed I have been pondering the eponymous question recently.
I don’t have many readers and I have made no real effort to expand my audience, but cannot quite bring myself to quit. I have considered a “goodbye cruel world” post on a few occasions but ended up chickening out. I am not really sure why I bother other than the feeling of failure if I just gave up.
I find writing mentally draining and I cannot bash off posts. Even this reply took several minutes to write and I put of writing it for a few hours. I do feel a sense of relief when I write a post (or reply), it is like a loss of “guilt” over not doing something. I suspect that such mixed feelings about writing are not unique.
More than you wanted to know (and more than I expected to write) about my blogging/posting habits.
PS
Congratulations Ferdi, on building a successful blog, it is one of my frequent stops.
Careful young Jedi, the force is strong but you are young. Don’t get too full of yourself.
Good writers are a dime a dozen. Good thinking is rare. The problem with good writing is that it can sometimes hide bad thinking, or even worse, you become known for your style instead of your message. I can think of a few good writers whose message is totally eclipsed by the quality of their writing.
Mencken is an example. People think of him as critic or good journalist because of the nature of his work, yet he was a powerful political thinker. Chesterton suffered a similar fate, being more remembered for his witty paradoxes than the sheer quality of his thought.
Remember, the skill is not in the pleasure of a well written autopsy report but in working out accurately what killed the patient. That’s hard.
@default user.
Good ideas badly expressed are better than bad ideas well expressed.
An interesting topic, writers who have published primarily on the net who have real literary value. I can only thing of five:
You / Myself (before I took the blog down) / Roissy / Jim Kalb / Deogolwulf
Six: Michael Blowhard
(unless you excluded him because he’s primarily published on paper, but I have no knowedge of his work other than 2BH)
I’d add John Dolan / “Gary Brecher” to that list. The combination of Roissy on sex and Brecher on violence is a powerful antidote to utopian cant.
Hey, thanks for the hat tip.
I think the reason this blog in particular is so popular is three fold:
- Consistency (in post frequency)
- Honest writing ability
- Moderate and diverse content
The last is in terms of your views, in that they have a broad catchment of interest and readers, not just a niche racialist crowd like Occidental Dissent, for example. Even hedonistic Roissy takes a moment to glimpse at and observe politics from time to time, which annoy some of his PUA regulars, but most of us find interesting and givers more depth. When you have that jack of all trades approach to blogging that all can relate to, with the skill to back it up, make it readable and have the regularity of posting, it is a perfect storm.
This is one of the few blogs that I visit on a regular basis. Why is that? It is well written, informative, humorous and provocative with the just the right amount of intellectual depth without becoming too ponderous. Your posts are the right length with a good amount of information. Too many blogs have posts that are too long and too pretentious; when I read a blog I am looking primarily to be entertained, to take a few minutes to distract me from the world, or to find legitimate information and substance on a particular topic. I will not read a post on a blog that goes on and on and on, unless I am really into the topic. Plus you post only once a day, which is good. I don’t want to read multiple daily posts on a blog. I think the old adage “less is more” is appropriate for blogging. You are able to balance all of those things well. Plus your (previous) pics of hot, semi-nude women were a good incentive too. Keep up the good work!
Ferd,
I always like reading posts like this. I agree with the consensus here: you adhere to the Goldilocks principle better than any blogger around.
As for writing to stave off mental blue balls. I’ve found the same. In truth I think I get more cranky when I have mental blue balls rather than actual ones. Neither is fun, and its always easy to find a random bathroom to assuage the latter.
When I went on my hiatus I experienced something interesting. Mostly I was quite happy not blogging all the time or thinking about what I was going to write or overanalyzing everything I saw. I think I was physically healthier and probably more pleasing to be around. But I could only ignore that internal fire for so long. I felt like I was missing something or that I would go crazy if I didn’t start thinking and reading and writing again.
These forces all seem very difficult to manage and I envy anyone who can properly balance all of these pushes and pulls.
Since The Spearhead put thumbs up or down in their comments section, the pace appears to have picked up. I wonder if having some prestige attached to comments, it would lead to more insightful comments. I mean this for serious topics though, as I know when there’s a time for banter.
I look forward to Linkage is Good for You, but would suggest cutting it down and maybe putting it out twice as often. It’s getting a little overwhelming.
Finally, the internet has opened up young writers to more options to have their voices heard. I am not sure of the history of blogging, but this seems to be a time of intellectual freedom and pursuit long missing from popular culture. Since first getting a computer a few years ago (age 42 now), I couldn’t find good blogs. But about a year ago I seemed to have gravitated towards yours, CR, Spearhead, Dalrock etc etc.
In the blogosphere, I tend to be a “reader” more than a commenter. In fact, I had the comments turned off on my blog for the longest time which is akin to self-induced blog-sabotage, but whatever. Needed to be honest with myself.
As much as I find the in-your-face-hysteria approach amusing and difficult to ignore on the part of assorted bloggers in this MRA/HBD/PUA sector, I still enjoy the understated and pragmatic tone of your expression. It is the one I can relate to the strongest.
My comment is too long.
http://pukeko.net.nz/blog/2010/11/mindless-zombies-or-citizens/
Chris
So you feel a burning urge to write.
You see, while I love reading and ideas in general, I’d really do anything other than write. When I have a free afternoon or evening (which is rare with two jobs), I tend to immediately gravitate to:
1. Extended workout
2. Practicing music
3. Reading a novel or instructional book
When I do get the urge to write, it’s usually poetry or short fiction, and nobody should ever post blogs about that, because it just seems ridiculous.
As best as I can tell, I blog to feed my Id. The personality that comes across on my blog is far different from the one I have in real life.
I write because I’d have killed someone by now if I couldn’t.
Here’s why I keep coming back: you’re not selling anything, you’re not obsessed with counting the number of rings on your dong, while you explore important emerging political currents in society -but you’re not a member of one or trying to convert anybody, you’re not beholden to any clique or worried about what some racial group thinks of you. In short: you’re an honest man -a commodity in incredibly short supply in our decrepit age of sneaks, conformists, politically correct geldings and careerist ass kissers. Oh yeah, and you link me once in a while -that helps too.
Have you given thought to the possibility that you will simply out of stuff to blog about wrt the current SMP and feminist lies without repeating yourself?
I think the key to good blogs is resilience and sticking with a theme. You’re doing both.
At some point a saleable product is useful too.
I agree with Joseph Dantes on this one: your stats are high due to beng fake-edgy yet PC with the (high traffic) HBD/Game clique’s doctrines.
And despite claims of badassery, you’re scared to let alpha male PUA Sexy Pterodactyl comment here freely (using “safe space” censorship reminiscent of left feminist, aka feminii, blogs):
There ain’t no contest between dem dweeby men and I
My blogs got free speech, dem censors like feminii
Feel free to respond with PUA nerdling hysteria or censorship, as the mood strikes you.
EscapistTard:
post tits or gtfo
@Anonymous Nov 15: What a kind offer. I’m not particularly interested in your chest parts, but Sexy Pterodactyl may post your photo if you’re not careful.
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