To begin with....

Well, it's taken me a while to finally get going on this blog, but I'm going to take a more serious crack at actually writing regularly now that I'm fully healed and settled back into my life.

It can be hard to start writing though. Everyone has something to say, but it is a skill to be able to write or talk or express oneself in any kind of interesting manner consistently over any considerable period of time. The late David Foster Wallace wrote a great piece about a talk radio host, John Ziegler, for the Atlantic about five years ago. In it he makes the following point, which, with minor modifications can be applied to blogging or writing or really any form of human expression as well.

Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don't have names. To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you're saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you're speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you're saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you're discussing.

Producing content on its own is hard, and producing interesting content is harder still.

But the goal is to try, and I think that the act of trying to produce at least a daily post will be a useful exercise for me. If nothing else, it will help me clarify my thinking on the issues and topics I care about.