by Joe Machine

Created on: July 26, 2010

I've started this article four times now and scrapped each one, finally realising that you won't want a potted history of blogging or a list of blog types, subjects and their uses. Instead you want just what the title promised: to hear about my own blogging experience.

 I began blogging in late 2005 when my wife's job with the UK Foreign Office took us to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia for two years. What better way to keep family, friends and colleagues informed of our adventures? In the early days as we prepared to pack up and move over I was posting daily, sometimes twice or even three times a day. I'd write about our plans, how I felt, what worried me. When we got to Riyadh too there were lots of things going on to write about, so things were nice and easy. But as the days and weeks went on my posts became less frequent, less regular. There always seemed to be something else to do. By the time it was down to one a week it had started to feel more like a chore than a pleasure. Who was I doing this for? I only had a handful of readers and it started to feel like the effort wasn't worth the reward. It wasn't that I ran out of ideas; at any point I could list half a dozen topics for future posts. But picking a topic is a lot easier than writing a lively, clear, entertaining piece on it. It takes effort. It's hard work – for me at any rate.

 It was at that point that my love/hate relationship with blogging began. I knew I wanted to write, maybe even do it professionally one day, but the self-imposed obligation to post something witty and sharp every day used to gnaw away at my self-confidence.

Now some of you might be thinking at this point that I'm taking things way too seriously, but I don't know another way. There are thousands, hundreds of thousands of casual bloggers out there who just bang out the first thing that comes into their heads, with varying levels of quality. And some are good, really good. But it doesn't come that naturally to me so I have to choose between churning out crap (a waste of time) and agonising over each post to the point where I don't post anything at all for ages.

I'm sorry if this isn't what you were looking for, but at least it's an honest description of how I feel about blogging. To try and end on a positive note, things are looking up for my writing. I've just re-joined Helium after a two year gap and my new blog is going well too. I'm starting to learn that writing anything, even if you think it's rubbish, is better than writing nothing at all. So I write something every day. Whether I publish it on my blog or not depends on how good it is.

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