Taking a little break from this writing competition

[pseydtonne]

I have come to understand that I may like writing, but I don't think LJ is what I need right now.

I got into this because I wanted an audience for my writing and feedback to improve it. I don't get a lot of comments. My other friends get a lot of comments. Rather than whine about it I have tried to understand what I am not doing that y'all are doing well. I realize that I don't write things that lead to commentary.

Simply saying "any ideas?" at the end of a post is not how you get dialogue. However, that does work in the spoken world. You say "like, I have this moth problem in my kitchen" or "what the fargh was I thinking when I thought I'd get laid at DragonCon without a costume?" and you get actual responses. This leads to discussion and mutant, more interesting topics.

Instead, I see that LJ isn't about telling a story. If you have a full arc, you don't get comments. You get readers, which is good. However, you don't become the water cooler guy the way you can in the outside world.

I need to slow down my posting from "at least once a week" to "when I'm damn ready to say something" and understand that I may not get comments. This is not about what anyone said to me. I am just not feeling involved in this community in a way that I need.

I need real-world humans. I also need to pontificate, but I have no idea whether that is what any of you want when you read me. I have to stop worrying about whether I am pleasing anyone so I need a break.

Frankly, I'm going too far explaining it this much because I want to edit, change the words. If I edit this, I won't wind up posting it.

Instead, I am going to announce my next desire: I want to start podcasting. I want my bullshit to flow the way it suits me most. I have a mixing board. All I need is a good microphone and I'll get it going in the next couple months.

This LJ was an outgrowth of my old mass email, Pot Sherd. hakamadare said to me this evening that would make this next step "Pod Sherd". I like that concept. It's time to start.

Comments

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

I am glad you wrote, actually. I didn't know where I stood with you because I always feel like an incidental, fuzzplugjones's whacky friend. I guess it's because I'm so much a performer that I don't know what to do when I'm not performing... or pissed off.

computer mediated socialization

[gravitrue.livejournal.com]

When you are at a water cooler, your audience knows you
are speaking to them. On LJ, it's far less tangible.
No one knows who is in the virtual room, so the usual
conversational dynamics can't easily form.

Also, editing in these silly little boxes is a bitch,
as is postponing thoughts for later. Thus, folks who
post things like "I am having a lousy day" get
replies like "*hug*", and folks who want a good auto mechanic
get recommendations, both of which can be composed quickly,
but people who post "I've been considering lately
the logarithmic nature of the human perception of
time" don't get much back. Yes, there are clients,
but I doubt half the population uses them.

LJ as a media form tends towards simple, short discussions.
Not shallow neccessarily; folks express deep emotions here,
but by implication, not in great detail.

Also, the replies you see posted are quite possibly a reflection
of some of the relations that folks have off of LJ; someone's
housemates, lovers, horndogs, etc. reply to their messages.
If you see a bunch of friends who've known each other for a
while and are comfortable with each other, and you don't know them,
it's easy to feel excluded or wonder why they aren't being as friendly
to you as to each other.

I like what you write, but I often go three months without having
time to check lj. I don't do podcasts yet, but might sometime.

[freshwater-pr0n.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Some of my favorite posts garner no comments; the dumbest, shallow ones tend to pull people out of the woodwork. Later on, sometimes months later, my friends will bring up a point that I've never spoken, but expressed only in a lonely, commentless post. Radio silence doesn't always mean that people aren't reading and reflecting upon your words.

There seems to be an art to eliciting comments, and while it shares some similarities to writing well, it's not the same thing. That being said, nothing gets people talking like an "I'm taking a break from LiveJournal" post. It's like magic! *runs off to make her own*

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

I felt severely silly saying "I'm not gonna write for a while" instead of simply not writing for a while because I knew I needed to stir something in myself. I am embarrassed by the attention but some part of me must have needed it. I do feel better, so it did something for me. I posted this last night and hadn't checked for replies until I got home 24 hours later and was thinking "Something Positive, Freefall, Wapsi Square, maybe Slashdot... nah, not in the mood for /. after the phone conference today where I learned how much more I know than this one field tech dude... oh yeah, that self-centered post I made!"

Thank you for replying, by the way. It helped me.

[dimers.livejournal.com]

I have a rather different perspective on commentlessness. It's one that I love to share.

ceelove used to send me letters when I was away at college. As her writing style evolved with her needs, the letters became much longer, sometimes ten handwritten pages or more. I had a hard time responding to them meaningfully; as she might recall, I tried substituting humor instead of meaning. Largely, my response was because ceelove had covered the ground thoroughly enough that I didn't feel I had anything to add besides a recitation of my emotional response. I didn't have ideas that could be useful.

And partly, I couldn't respond to those letters, and most long journal entries, because there's not enough time in the day! If I were to really concentrate on a single paragraph of any text -- her letters, a physics book, the questions posed by my friendslist -- I could write something significant about it. And my response would spawn a dozen other ideas that I could write down, too, things related to my life or other perspectives on the situation or web links for information or goddess only knows. It could take me a couple hours to respond completely to one small part of a post or a letter. I could be certain of losing response-worthy concepts along the way, too, since I have only hazy recall of my branching thought-tree.

So I may choose between "nothing" to respond, or in penetrating that illusion, get so in-depth that a chunk of my life has disappeared, without knowing whether *anything* I have said might be useful (my friends are all too intelligent, dammit! stop thinking of stuff on your own!), and without a sense of completion because I can't pursue every relevant idea.

If you post a five-line whine, you'll get a response from people who care about you. If you ask a question with concrete and short answers, you'll get some answers. If you tell people that a .2 Euro works as a T slug, people can respond with other facts about coins or slugs, if they know any. If you choose to write about the complexity that lies in your heart, about the interesting things that happen to you and that question aspects of our collective culture, about intangibles like geeklove and what makes employment good or bad ... there will often be nothing of meaning to add, or so much that a friendslist becomes a full-time enterprise.

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

... and if there is something meaningful to add, it's often difficult to go out there on a limb and say what I'm feeling. There's a complexity in human interactions that is difficult to put into words, let alone commit to writing. On a difficult subject, I may have a lot to say but not know how to say it or how other readers will take my comments or who else might be reading it. Plus, I might not want to be the first person to say something, depending on how sensitive I feel about the topic.

So there's my $0.02.

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

LJ isn't about telling a story. If you have a full arc, you don't get comments. You get readers, which is good.

It's true. It seems to me that LJ is either a social medium or a storytelling/blogging medium, but rarely both.

I have to stop worrying about whether I am pleasing anyone so I need a break.

Good plan. I like reading your journal, though, so I hope you come back eventually, when you're ready.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

I say, "Hear, hear" to freshwater_pr0n's observation about the inverse correlation between seriousness of the post and the number of comments. For example, let's take the current front-page view of my journal for experimental data:

• A somewhat humorous meditation on college, aging, sexual attraction and class (because that's what it's all about, if only people would listen...), which I think was rather well-composed: one comment.
• A silly parlor game in which I tell people what flavor of Jello I would wrestle them in: 79 comments, possibly my all-time high.

You've complained about your relative lack of comments before, and I've replied previously with some advice. I'm not going to repeat that advice. Instead, I'll make an observation. You obviously care about this, and it's natural that you would because you have a history of performing for an audience. It's so much a part of who you are. I, on the other hand, could not care less whether people comment or not. This is also to be expected, given my personality. Yet I tend to get more comments than you. Perhaps there's another inverse relation there? Perhaps people detect your desperation for feedback, and, like desperation for 'tang, it has the opposite effect from what you desire. So I said I wasn't going to repeat my advice, but in effect I have, and to put it most compactly: Be an asshole, it works.

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

I was honestly scared to answer that latter post. I don't want to know how you'd wrestle me.

It does seem to come down to the stink of need. When you want something and you are clear about it but have nothing to trade in order to get it, you'll get the crappiest version of it if you get anything. A chugger with a fascinating schtick may get a buck or two every few minutes; a mendicant with body odor gets the occasional penny whipped at his head.

Maybe I should stop wanting anything that makes me grovel. After all, I'm a god of computer hardware, system configuration, music history, how to get from one point to another on the Eastern seaboard, subways, Canada... The point is: I have a lot to offer. If I want attention, I should not need to know that I am getting it. I should speak.

[ltbloodrose.livejournal.com]

Just because I don't always comment doesn't mean I don't read.

LJ for me is a way to keep up with what's going on in my friends' lives. If you don't write, I won't know what's going on. :(

[teddywolf.livejournal.com]

I've been reading a lot, and commenting some. I currently don't have anyway to handle podcasts, so I might be a bit left out techwise in keeping up with you. But, you do what you gotta do.

I find that my longer posts, especially the Mystery House ones, don't usually get many comments. I've had some one-liners get more comments than the ones that take over two hours to write.

I'm not saying this is a *good* thing. I'm just saying that there's the matte of style. Like you, sometimes I cover both the question and the answer in my post. At times, this means I won't get conversation when it might be what I want.

It's very rare for me to post something with comments disabled. I want conversation. But I also want people to read and digest. I ask myself, do I have a preference between people reading my words and weighing them seriously, or them simply responding whether or not they weigh them? I know that responses can mean they've weighed my scribblings, but it doesn't always.

I have no answer yet.

[fuzzplugjones.livejournal.com]

I'm just miffed that you chose to stop writing right before you were going to write about how I got fucked.

[graciana.livejournal.com]

If you podcast let me know. I'd tune it.

As to the whole LJ thing not about telling a story - you're right. My LJ for me was more a tool to recognize that ANYTHING can be a story. Yet that's what makes my life so "shirleyesque".

Also, I owe you a phone call. I recognize this. I'll be doing it on Sunday.

[(Anonymous)]

The Reaper demands that you keep writing.