The Uses of Writing a Blog

The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it.
Benjamin Disraeli

I started this blog — if I remember correctly (it’s been a long time!) — to add information to a book on creativity I wrote. The first version of “Organizing Creativity”. After that, I just kept on writing. And personally, I have not regretted doing so.

Sure, writing a blog takes time. Not only for researching material for blog postings, or writing the postings (in my second language!), but also for dealing with finding nice quotations, thumbnail images, technical issues, etc. pp.

But it’s time well spend.

Perhaps the main reason why the time on this blog is time well spend is that I (have reason to) believe it actually helps people. Whether it’s tiny annoyances like the typewriter mode in Scrivener (or Scrivener as brilliant writing software) or fully-fledged way to organize creativity like in the free-to-download PDF of “Organizing Creativity”, yeah, I really believe it helps people (= perhaps you 🙂 ).

And that’s powerful — feeling useful. 🙂

But even the more reflective pieces, the questions and slightly to completely off-topic postings have their uses. Sure, they might not have a direct connection to organizing creativity, unless you consider that creativity and its organization takes place in a context that is affected by these issues — unfortunately, oftentimes very much so. But they also do have a personal benefit for me: They help me to articulate my position (even if some positions make my unemployable by the political correct majority).

This support to articulate one’s position is actually one of the benefits of writing blogs. You develop your voice. You learn to convey your thoughts in an understandable manner. You learn to argue on a level beyond “I like it so it must be true/I dislike it so it must be false”. And even without feedback — likely with “minefield issues” — you learn a lot by reflecting about it and imagining possible reactions.

So, in this sense — looking back at over five years of postings — I think this blog worked for all involved. 🙂