I’ve completed my InstaMunger experiment — an entire business week of nothing but pithy, snarky posts on whatever I happened to be reading. Of course, by Saturday I was feeling the effects of not being able to write out an extended thought so much that I felt compelled to write a bonus, non-InstaMunger post.
Since a couple commenters have asked why I did it, I thought I’d take a moment to explain. I was feeling in a bit of a rut with the usual WordMunger posts — like if I didn’t have 500-plus words to say on a topic, I shouldn’t be saying anything at all. And so I found that, more often than not, I was saying nothing at all.
The reason I started Word Munger in the first place was to help me with my other writing — it’s a place where I can get whatever I’m thinking about off my chest so that it’s not polluting my thoughts as I work on other, more extended writing projects. In short, if I’m not posting in Word Munger, it’s going to be negatively impacting my other writing.
So InstaMunger was a way of freeing up my thoughts by removing that bit of censorship from what I was doing here. I decided to give myself a week to not worry about quality, just quantity. And it worked. Not only did I write a lot more Word Munger posts, I did more writing outside of Word Munger — the kind of writing that pays the bills.
I think I’m going to keep InstaMunger around. I’m not sure if Word Munger is going to turn into a Kottke or Rebecca Blood, where every day there’s an assortment of long and short posts, but I do like the idea of not always feeling constrained to write a mini-essay with every post. If you don’t like the InstaMunger posts, they’re short enough to skip over. I’ll definitely be writing some meatier posts, so there should be a little of something for everyone. Hope you like it.