'Tis a far, far better thing to have blogged and overshared than to never have blogged at all?

Lately I’ve been having not so much a hard time writing as a hard time not writing crap. I’ve been dutifully sitting down for an hour a day with an attitude of, “Well, the main thing is trying. Doing. Not flaking. Writing. Anything above and beyond that is gravy.” And I’ve been producing a bunch of stuff that’s unpublishable. Either it’s too ragey or too personal or too irritatingly ambiguous. Lots of “Dear Diary,” but not much “Dear Internet.” I want to blog about things that are on my mind but I don’t want *all* of the things on my mind to be on my blog. And skirting around issues in a way that’s satisfying for both the writer and the reader is tricky.

It’s made me think about filtering.

You know those Facebook statuses or blog posts that are like, “Hi. Whoever told my ex where I was going to go and what I was going to do needs to get a life and stop judging and hating. BECUZ U DON’T KNOW MY LIFE!” And you read it and think, “Dude, you have like 1200 friends and your timeline reads like a detailed itinerary of your daily life complete with GPS check-ins, photo and video evidence, and colorful commentary from you and everyone you were there with. *Everyone* knows your life. Also – despite my best efforts to *not* know this – you had a messy break up. How, exactly, did you think this *wasn’t* going to get back to your ex? Instead of posting this it would have been way less dramatic if you’d just rented billboard space across from his apartment and then accused everybody who noticed it of “getting all up in your business.””

If you put it all out there, then it’s all out there and you can’t take it back. It’s possible to genuinely and authentically participate in a larger conversation and share your life experience while still having a filter. Or at least I hope/assume so.

Then there are the posts that filter so much out that they don’t say anything at all and, as a reader, don’t give anything for you to hold on to or identify with. The ones where it’s a series of stuff like, “OMG, today another rough day. I just can’t catch a break. Such hard times right now” or “Frustrated!” and when inevitably there are follow up comments like “I’m sorry you feel bad. What’s up?” or “WTF are you talking about?” the poster suddenly develops an interest in reticence and etiquette and replies along the lines of, “Well, I’m not going to talk about this on the internet because I don’t gossip UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE WHO KNOW WHO THEY ARE” or “This isn’t the right place for me to talk about this. I just really need support right now.”

The vague-booker / vague-blogger puts a plea for unquestioning love and support out there without adding anything to the larger conversation and just ends up reading as a cry for attention.

But what do you do when you’re trying to consistently blog and all that seems to come out of your fingers is either unpublishable because it’s too vague-bloggy, too revealing, or just plain crap. Is it better to write a crappy post just to have written something or is it better to have l-o-n-g unexplained break?

Maybe this is why “Wordless Wednesdays” or “Instagram Phone Dump Mondays” are so popular. Your blog still seems active even though you haven’t really addressed anything substantive.

And maybe this is also why highly focused blogs tend to work better. No matter what’s going on with you, you can lampoon the news, take a picture, or try a new recipe.

So perhaps that’s what I need to start doing during times when “just writing about what I want to write about” doesn’t cut it.

But then I dislike blogs that are too “schticky.” Every day of the week has some kind of alliterative theme and most of the ‘content’ either involves giveaways, contests, or pleas to get followed or liked or pinned. I get that these types of techniques might be effective in building a popular or otherwise monetizing a blog and in moderation I have no issue with them. But there’s also the danger of so thoroughly focusing on “building your blog” that you filter out any actual interesting content.

Blerg.

So not too over-sharey but not too vague-booky with more frequent posting and some “schtick” to fall back on.

Balance is the answer to most things. Good to know I had to write AN ENTIRE BLOG POST to come up with that one. Perhaps my next posts can be about “Moderation: It turns out this concept may have some merit” and “Water: Wet, necessary for life, but don’t drown in it.”

So balance. And also possibly a nice long run followed by a drink to get out of my own head.

So. What say you re: the filtering? ‘Tis a far, far better thing to have blogged and overshared than never to have blogged at all? Or more along the lines of, “If you don’t have anything interesting to say then for the love of GOD STFU because Lord knows the People of the Internet need to work on that one as a whole?