Non-renewable Blogging

I think a lot about the idea of being used up. When I think of factory workers, farmers, and other jobs with hard labor, it’s obvious; your knees get shot, you need a hip replaced, your body wears down, and you just can’t take it anymore. And in sports, age is a huge factor, the thing that takes down stars much more than injuries. But it’s much less obvious what it means for other professions.

Do programmers get used up? I guess it might be different now, with the advent of LLMs, but back when I was a programmer, the common thinking was that programmers only grew more powerful with age. No one would have said that there were a limited number of good programs you could write in your life, aside from the inevitability of cognitive decline, which comes late in life and doesn’t tend to fell the grey-bearded ones.

But of course I’m a writer, and I think about writing, and whether you can be used up in the way a warehouse worker might be, hobbled by what you’ve done with no more to give but shouted instructions to younger workers.

A few years ago I wrote a relatively short post about a time I ate a jar of pickled garlic in high school. It did pretty well, but it left me feeling hollow. I had one overriding thought: this is a story that I cannot tell again.

Growing up, my dad was a man of anecdotes. He was a chamber orchestra conductor, and after every concert he would glad-hand with everyone who’d shown up, many of them patrons of the arts, smiling and telling stories while his children, in their nicest clothes, stood awkwardly to one side. I heard my father’s anecdotes, and most of them many times, enough that the punchlines are seared into my brain, if not all the details. There was one that ended, “Sables, for beggars?” said in the thick accent of a Kansan yokel, always in this same specific way. He had stories about his time spent in Berlin, getting his knitting torn apart by the Stasi when crossing from East to West. There was a charming way he told these stories, leaning into them with a confident voice. And because I was often simply there, not the focus of his attention, I heard them over and over.

There’s something joyful in that, I guess, meeting a new person to tell one of your best stories to, finding yourself in another crowd, working the material until it shines.

This is not really something that you can do with the written word.

The written word is eternal, in some sense, and if you’ve told a story once, then to tell it again all you need to do is copy and paste. If you tried to make a blog where you retold stories over and over, you would be rightfully looked at as an insane person. It does sometimes happen that people will package up the same material in a few different ways, editing and amending, putting it in different forms, but in the current media landscape, you only tell a story once.

So if you start blogging memoir-style, telling the stories you’ve been developing at dinner parties and while chatting late at night, eventually you’re going to run out of your best material. You’ve gone into the old-growth forest and cut down the best trees, and they won’t regrow, not fast enough to feed the beast.

It’s a bit different with authors. An author isn’t just drawing from their own life, they’re drawing from the lives of others and inventing from whole cloth. But I still do wonder how many books an author can usefully write before repeating themselves or saying everything that they have to say.

There are ultra-prolific authors like Stephen King, who has published roughly 67 novels, but a common criticism is that later novels repeat what was done better in earlier ones. Stephen King writes about small New England towns where writer protagonists suffer from the supernatural. While I don’t think it would be correct to say that if you’ve read one of his books, you’ve read them all, taken in aggregate, there are pretty sharp diminishing returns.

When you write a book, it’s an expression of yourself, almost inevitably, of your preoccupations and viewpoint, the things that you’re drawn to.

And when you write a second book, you don’t want people who’ve read the first to think “ah, this again.” So you have to have new preoccupations, new viewpoints, new things, new ideas. You have to change and grow, unless you’ve held bits of yourself in reserve to deploy later.

But if an author is going to write a smaller corpus of books in their lifetime, something more reasonable like Vonnegut’s thirteen novels or Toni Morrison’s eleven, maybe they can make each one a different thing, distinct from all that came before, not mired in the hyperspecific idioms of a singular person.

There’s a sense in which blogging is close to optimally bad when it comes to not repeating yourself. It favors high output and shorter works, so if you’re a “professional blogger”, you’re incentivized to write multiple posts a week. How many stories do you have? How many connections can you make? What keeps you from getting to the point where you’ve said all you have to say?

I do think it’s true that some bloggers go downhill, having said the things they had to say. It’s one of the fates that might await you, if you’re spilling everything out for years on end.

Others will instead turn outward, moving to reviews and responses, current events or whatever some moron on Twitter said this week. But I think that this has its own pitfalls, the biggest of which is that it’s just not that interesting; I sometimes read an article and think of Jay Leno standing up saying, “didja hear about,” before making a joke that lands with the weight of a feather. I’ve read writing that makes me think of reaction videos, a blogger whose job is less to produce insight and more to create a sympathetic emotional reaction in the audience. I’m not quite willing to say that responding to the news is creatively bankrupt, but it is often low-effort.

Maybe it’s not inevitable that every writer comes to a point where there’s no more left to give, but for mere mortals, every post is the tick of a clock counting down.