On the one hand, this blog post is just some filler content. I’m trying to keep up with my schedule of a new blog post every other day and needed to write something, and so this will have to do. I’m writing this on a dull, wet Saturday afternoon and have next to no inspiration to write anything useful. What I write won’t rank highly on search engines, or get reposted lots of time on social media. In fact, you’re probably wasting your time reading this because I’m only writing it because I feel I have to, and not because I necessarily want to. After all, Google and other search engines like web sites that are updated frequently, and if I take another long break from blogging then my posts will drop down the rankings and no-one will ever visit.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s good just to write utter rubbish. It gets your brain going, and once you’ve written some utter rubbish and cleared your head, you’ll be warmed up to write something more useful. At least, that’s the theory, according to this book by Gillie Bolton and Russell Delderfield (sponsored link) that I read back in 2021.
I read the book as part of a postgraduate university course that I did, mostly during lockdown, which included teaching on reflective practice. This wasn’t one of the core books on the reading list, but it was recommended to me by, err, well, Russell Delderfield himself. He’s a former colleague of mine. Gillie Bolton, the principal author, is a big fan of writing anything for a few minutes, and recommends it at the start of each exercise in the book.
Does it work? Well, it’s not a method that I use much – most blog posts that I write have spent at least a few days in my head before I write them down. But when faced with the need to write something, I suppose it’s helped here. I’ve left the first paragraph in; if I was writing professionally, I’m sure that an editor would probably remove it and want me to SEO optimise the remaining text. That’s not going to happen here. This is going to be a completely un-optimised, un-edited stream of consciousness blog post that might be useful for some people. And sometimes that’s okay. I mean, it’s my blog after all.