I’m coming off of four years where I spent most of my time researching. In scholarship (at least in biblical studies), there is super high level original work and there’s really poor quality stuff. I’m fine with both of those. The former is to be studied and the latter ignored. But there’s a third category of stuff that’s just ok. Some new points, lots of rehearsing old hat, interaction with some primary sources but more as they’re mediated by other scholars. That’s the stuff I can’t stand. It cannot be studied with great benefit nor can it be conveniently ignored if it relates to what one is researching. I feel like that’s most of where my PhD reading went, and it left me with an impression: few books that should exist don’t; most books that do exist shouldn’t.

The writer must earn her book’s existence through mastery of the material, argument, and expression. My working assumption is that authors should labor for hours over what will take their readers minutes to obsorb.

I had frequently taken a similar posture to the interweb, where the information glut is even more pronounced. It bothered me when I saw people who would write books and then change their minds a few years later or blog posts that they’d recant after a few weeks.

But now I’m not so sure. I think for me, I’ve had notions in my head that too readily separates written and spoken words. I’m a great fan of learning by conversing. One of my main tools here is to tell someone my working theory of something and hear their thoughts and critique. I typically would rather learn through a conversation than a lecture or a book. I committed early on when I started my PhD to just sound stupid so greater minds could enlighten me on what I didn’t know (with great success).

Scholarly publications are also a conversation, perhaps the great conversation. It’s a slow and varied one, but if my PhD thesis gets published and then reviewed and then (perhaps, though unlikely) I write “A Brief Rejoinder to Amherst”—well, it’s a conversation. My beef, going back to the beginning, is the conversation partners are often not working from the level of rigor that I think they should. But hopefully, if the system works, folks won’t just learn from my book, but I might be forced to rethink some things in my book from their responses. All the same, I think the medium of the book (in nonfiction) approaches the reader as the one who will “learn from” the author. Conversely, the medium of conversation is more “learning with” the conversants.

I think I used to think of social media as “learning with” platforms (though I’ve always had a content producing ilk since I started blogging at age 10). This old social media was half-baked thoughts put out there for half-baked responses. But somewhere along the line that went away as these platforms—which were never great—were overcome by “thought leaders” and their “takes.” The position is articulated and sent into the void. The intended responses are either “This.” or an angry emoji. Little or no conversation here.

But now I’m trying to blog, micro.blog specifically. And am trying to write stuff that’s not great or finished or the sort of stuff someone might learn from. It’s just what I’m thinking. And hopefully it’ll be a means of learning with others.

It also hurts something in me. There’s that something that really really wants to only put words out into the void that I will think are right, well-argued, well-articulated, full of grace and charm, that I will think are oh-so right until the day (or night) I die. That can be a good thing, but not always. I’m trying to convince my perfectionist five-year-old all the time, “It’s ok to make mistakes.” And that’s something I’m still learning. I’ve now come to respect some folks I’ve followed who change their minds weeks after they publish essays arguing for something, because that seems to me to be a profoundly humble stance. One that’s not so precious about what we write. One that puts something out there and is now ready for out there to send something thoughtful back. One that can both change minds and be changed by them.

So, a mini-festo for how I hope to micro.blog:

  1. don’t overthink stuff, just stream-of-consciousness everything
  2. edit as little as possible (just leave “I think I used to think of” in there—no one cares)
  3. remember, it’s just pixels—they’re all going to go away someday anyway
  4. posts are conversation starters, not the last word and testament on X subject
  5. let that proud perfectionism die