How to write meaningfully?

It's a good season to reflect on what personal writing is actually interesting for other people. The festive season's circular letters have ranged from the entertaining or interesting or useful to the ... well ... frankly boring. Subscribing to people's personal blog posts is little different. So how does Peter Limberg manage it? I should ask him, straight. Here are my guesses of the moment.

Points to avoid

Writing things which mean something to me but not to other people. For example: What I ate today. My state of health. How much time I wasted. What I've been thinking about, vaguely, but haven't made any sense of yet.
Too much cringe. People who might enjoy reading cringeworthy things I have written are not the kind of people I would really enjoy writing for. And cringe is a tricky subject – so well covered by Contrapoints. I'll have to watch that again. Peter seems to get away with things that are quite close to this, but rarely steps over the line into cringe, despite his protestations. I'll need to study this some more.
And similarly, writing that is too far, either way, either into self-congratulation or self-critique. Either can be cringworthy. And yet, what I write needs to be based on my own experience, my own meaning. Tricky balance here.

Better ideas?

My explorations of things which other people might like to do, might dream of, perhaps even might fantasise about, but haven't got round to doing. This is delicate, as it could be pretty close to cringe. "Too much detail" is rather tempting. Stop at the right moment.
Maybe a good idea is to write the classic "over-sharing" material privately, every so often, to get it out of the system? So there will be some blanks here.
So maybe the challenge as a daily reflection time is to sit with the thoughts of the day, and let something emerge that will be story that will bear telling?
What else? What do people really want to read? Maybe the classic formula is, just what people have been wanting to say but hadn't found the words for, yet. Then, how to know what that is?

Which reminds me of something that has been on my mind this weekend – the seemingly rather abstract and maybe even dull topic of harmonising the information gathered by small social networks, so that that information can be shared. Why? Good question! The people involved in this idea (and there are several) have seen, as I do, all these little "communities" which do not interact, which all want the same kinds of change in society, but simply don't know about each other. Surely, I agree, we could be more effective when acting together, in some semblance of synergy. So let's gather together all that information, and...

But what we are inclined to forget is to ask, what will those people themselves do with all that information about other people, not only in their own network, but in the hundreds of other like-minded ones? This needs thinking through. So I'll stop there, not presenting my own personal half-baked thoughts, but ask you if you know someone who is in the same boat. Put them in touch, please!

And I guess that quite some people are struggling with similar questions. How can I write any kind of serial which other people will enjoy reading?

Topics: journal-writing

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