I’ve just been tweeting. But my phone, email and all other electronic gadgetry were switched off. If truth be told I was impersonating birds on behalf of my neighbour’s cat, who secretly visits me for a daily cuddle. Earlier, I was in the garden checking on the baby lettuces I planted outside yesterday (yes my New Year Resolutions are working). Call me a slow writer. I call it quality thinking time.
I take the advice of Natalie Goldberg who wrote a favourite zen-inspired book of mine, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer within. For anyone looking for creative encouragement, this continual bestseller was originally written in 1988, long before the cranked out, fast-paced blogging world. Goldberg stated:
“Give yourself tremendous space to wander in, to be utterly lost with no name, and then come back and speak.”
There is so much noise with the zillions of blogs already out there and I need that space away from my screen to think and form an opinion of my own before I set out to write.
So, as I broach the theme of slow blogging I’m delighted to realise that I’m not the only one: Todd Seiling’s wrote the original Slow Blog Manifesto in 2006.
Like the Slow Food Manifesto, Seiling has some wise jewels littered throughout. Like Goldberg, he too promotes silence. He explains that it is a “rejection of immediacy” and “speaking like it matters, like the pixels that give your words form are precious and rare. It is a willingness to let current events pass without comment.”
How come the best ideas and the funniest jokes come from when you’re having a drink with a friend in the pub, cuddling a pet or on the toilet? It’s because you’re relaxed, and have no other distractions. The same goes for communication.
My favourite point of Seiling’s Manifesto is that “Slow Blogging is a reversal of the disintegration into the one-liners and cutting turns of phrase that are often the early lives of our best ideas.” Tweet tweet to that.
Sadly, Seiling stopped blogging, which is no surprise given that he didn’t have the continuous traffic to make it worth it. He also dislikes pagerank: “Pagerank. Pagerank, the ugly-beautiful monster that sits behind the many folded curtains of Google, deciding the question of authority and relevance to your searches.”
But other slow bloggers, despite their popularity do exist – just look at the Slow Blog website for examples.
Another interesting idea for slow blogging includes Kirk Citron’s Long News project, part of San Francisco’s Long Now Foundation, where only “news items that are of long term consequence” appear. Of course, Citron is prophesising about a long-term future that no one will be able to question, if he does in fact get it wrong.
Even Twitter’s been slowed down by London-based Russell Davies too, who created Dawdlr. Davies plonks postcards on his website every six months, which answer the question “What are you doing now?” (as long as six months ago, I assume).
It’s purely an experiment, as he adds: “I’m curious to see if something that slow can be ‘viral’ or will it just dwindle to nothing as everyone forgets last time around.”
You could always join the snooze function campaign over at kung fu grippe, which sets about the option to snooze on particular friends while you are taking time out.
If you’re a civic blogger who is up for slowing it down, you can still go to Seiling’s site and create and share your own Slow Blogging Manifesto. See you there – after I’ve made a cuppa.
Image: laffy4k
