The small web is rehabilitating how I write
I've been writing for pay since I was 17. For 25+ years, writing has made up some part of my yearly income. For over ten years, writing made up 100% of my yearly income.
Most of that writing was done for the Web. Not the personal, people-driven small web, but the big, commercialized Web of Selling People Things. The Web of Engineering People's Behavior So They See More Ads and Buy More Things. The Web of What Sells.
That Web ruined my writing.
It wasn't so much SEO that did it. I actually find it easy to write people-focused work that also uses sufficient keywords to get a search engine's attention.* Rather, it was the demand for the sort of surface-level, slightly urgent cadence so common in commercial sites.
Go read any article at The Spruce or Bustle, or any law firm blog, and you'll see what I mean. It's a superficial, plasticky approach designed to give the reader just enough information to get them to buy something or to click the next article - but never enough information to satisfy them.** It pretends to be "useful content" without being usable content. The writing is a product, not a conversation.
When I started writing here, I intended to grab the most popular articles from my Big Professional Blog and re-post them here. The "most popular" ones had to be the best, right? The most worthy of preservation? The ones humanity somehow needed me to continue offering access to?
I was so deep in the sauce I didn't even see what I'd become.
Now, a week after starting this blog and about a month after abandoning Big Tech sites, I cannot imagine inflicting those pieces on all of you. Writing-as-sales-product is not what a people-focused Web is or ever will be about.
I'm going to save a couple on my Neocities site as a testament to the crap I used to write. I'm also going to save some of the posts that felt "too weird" when I posted them (and that did badly!).
Even better, since leaving social media/Big Tech, starting this blog and joining a few small-web forums, I'm noticing significant changes in my brain and my writing. And it's only been a week.
I'm calmer. My attention span is better. I get genuine satisfaction from both my online and offline activities.
My stamina for big projects has skyrocketed. Yesterday, I outlined one for my website, titled "Breaking Away from Big Tech." My goal is to lay out all the steps I'm taking and tools I'm using.***
It's going to be a much larger project than I originally anticipated. I'm estimating the final piece will be north of 30,000 words. Not the longest thing I've ever written, but the longest thing I've ever written for the Web.
Plasticky Corporate Product-Writer Me would never have had the patience for such a project. Big Professional Blog is littered with similar projects I started but never finished. Plastic Me needed pieces to go up quickly so they Generated Page Views and thus Income.
One of my ad agency colleagues called these pieces "snackable content." The phrase made my skin crawl then. It still does. Always snacking, never a meal.
Before, blogging 30,000+ words on a single piece would have felt like too much work for too little reward. Now, the work is the reward.
...It's been 25 years since I've said that about writing.
Writing in HTML, rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, has been good for me too. There's something about having to incorporate all the tags and structure that structures my writing, too.
I haven't written just because I want to since the previous century. Literally. I have not written like this since the 1990s.
It's great.
*Or I did before Google broke itself with AI, anyway
**I'll be writing about "information satiety" at lot more in the coming months, I suspect; my understanding of it is already changing as I start reading the World Book
***Present-progressive tense because I'm still refining