Here’s a confession: of late, I’ve been finding it tough to sit down and write my usual kind of longish posts.
And I blame the Gram for it. Instagram, I mean.
It’s just so much easier to put up a picture, write a hundred words (or not even that), and hit publish. The reward comes almost instantly – not necessarily the likes (I’ve never been much of a numbers person and I find ‘likes’ really lazy), but a comment or two. (See that? I’ll always be a blogger at heart, never an Instagrammar).
Someone responds, a friend says something and for a moment there’s that feeling of having reached another person. A small connection. A reassurance that someone out there is listening, reading and agreeing (or disagreeing).
That’s my happiness.
I’ve never aspired to a million likes or felt the need to connect with the faceless, nameless masses. What I’ve always loved is the smallness of it, the feeling of talking to a handful of real, identifiable people, who actually read what I write and connect with it.
The biggest advantage of Instagram is the sheer certainty of being seen, thanks to the scrolling addiction that no one is quite safe from. A blog post, on the other hand, requires intentional reading, it’s the whole business of clicking a link, opening a page, logging in and committing oneself to reading. That’s too much work.
Scrolling is just so much simpler.
When the children were babies, I found it easier to divide their food into bite-sized pieces, rather than to coax them to eat up on their own.
That’s exactly what I’m doing with my writing.
I am reducing it into bite-sized pieces and serving it to people in a form that easy to consume.
It’s the same with my book-reviews. I am trying to squeeze them into reels because apparently that’s all the time the Instagram community has.
That should be fine at some level – We tell ourselves we’re giving the reader what she wants and getting back what we want.
It’s easier for me too. It’s always simpler to shorten things, right, rather than to sit with a thought, work on it, develop it into a whole blogpost.
However, there’s a problem. There is a special kind of satisfaction in crafting a thousand word piece, of deep diving into a book or even writing about the mundane business of daily life. I never want to lose that.
I know of so many bloggers who have given up blogging. I hope I never do that. I hate the thought of the blog dying out.
So I’ve decided to try something.
Till I get my mojo fully back I’m going to bring my Instagram thoughts here. Tiny ‘post-lets’, ‘blog-lets’, call them what you will. Two-minute reads. Small thoughts.
I’m hoping these bloglets will ease me back into writing again. Perhaps a hundred words will lead to two hundred and before I know it, I’ll once again be happily writing pieces that refuse to end.
For now, though, I’m going to start small.
I had meant for this to be my first bloglet, but it got somewhat carried away and turned into a post.
Yay to that!