Unfinished posts

I am crap at writing. Like, really crap. You’re reading this, so you know I’m crap. I know it as well, and that puts me off writing - I’m aware that anything that I sit down to write will be below my standards.

In an effort to curb the procrastination that this causes, and to excuse half-baked ideas and prose, I’ve divided my posts into two rough categories: “unfinished”, and (implicitly) “finished”. The first category contains posts that I would otherwise not write, out of fear of writing them badly, or put off writing until I feel I have a fully realised idea to set into words. The aim of the category is to have a place to dump any writing, whether it is good or bad, without the worry that it needs to be a “complete”, well expressed, or well reasoned body of text.

Unfinished posts also include those that might take a while to write, such as notes taken over a period of time, or other posts that might be impossible to write all at once. In such cases the posts might be better thought out than the other posts in the “unfinished” category but they are not, in a sense, “done”. Rather than leaving such posts languishing in some dusty corner of my hard drive while they slowly accumulate words, I’d rather put them out there as soon as possible for others to see. That way their mere public presence provides me with motivation to expand them further, as well as giving a sort of “checkpoint” to interested readers.

None of the above, however, implies that posts in the finished category will be any better than those in the category of finished posts. Rather, the implicit finished category just contains posts that I’m, in some sense, “done with”. I may come back to the posts at some point, but they exist in their published state in a form which I am comfortable considering finished.