Dmitry Fadeyev reflects on the purpose of writing in Give Sight:

Meaningful writing has a purpose beyond that of simple entertainment or of generating conversation. Its purpose is to improve society, to improve our life, by teaching us certain truths that the author has learned. John Ruskin puts it well in his essay on books, Of Kings’ Treasuries, by saying that good books give us sight. By teaching us what to look for, and the value of those things, we learn to tell apart the good from the bad, to pass better judgements using our sharpened vision. We grow and become wiser. And that is the only sort of writing that ever improves us as people because all the rest, information and entertainment, it just passes by and leaves us in the same state that we are when we first come into contact with it.

I completely agree with this viewpoint, and that results in a constant struggle as I try to weigh the demands of long-form writing with the demands of, you know, having a day job. The compromise that many of us in this situation goes for, to keep the much-needed momentum of writing going (what Alex Charchar calls “act the pro”), is to share links and quick thoughts, interspersed with some long-form writing when inspiration and a brief excess of time collide.

I’m particularly self-conscious about the dangers of this approach after reading Marcelo Somers’s piece The Linkblog Cancer:

Our job as independent writers isn’t to be first or even to get the most pageviews. It’s to answer the question of “so what?”. Taken as a whole, our sites should tell a unique story that no one else can, with storylines that develop over time that help bring order to the chaos of what we cover.

That’s what I want to happen here, but I know I often fall short. I’ll keep doing it though, because I have hope that, taken as a whole, there is a thread running through the links I post and the essays I write, and that when I look back at it in a few years, that thread will spark some new and interesting ideas. We’ll see.