Today I want to coin the term bleet. It’s a type of short-form writing somewhere between a blog post and a tweet.

bleet noun

bliːt

  1. a short piece of writing published on a personal website, typically written hastily

    I'm adding a bleet category to my blog

  2. misspelling of bleat: a feeble outcry, protest, or complaint

    His blog is just a bunch of bleats about the lack of discipline in software developers

Etymology

Early 21st century English: portmanteau of blog and tweet.

One of the reasons why I haven’t been writing much in recent years is that each article takes a long time to produce. It’s more than just typing sentences until the document is full.

  • ideation
  • research
  • outlining/structuring/sequencing
  • simplifying sentences for non-native English speakers
  • referencing a dictionary and thesaurus to try and ensure I’m conveying my intended meaning clearly
  • investigating the origin of memes I want to use, so that I don’t get myself cancelled for inadvertently using something that originated from a degenerate 4chan post
  • inserting bits of sardonic humour to avoid falling asleep while writing, such as suggesting I might get cancelled for inadvertently using a 4chan meme
  • couching charged words like “4chan” with defensive writing like “inadvertently” to pre-empt negligent, drive-by assumptions about my character
  • general editing
  • proofing
  • promoting

These all take time. Producing a finished article can take anywhere from 3 to 20 hours — sometimes longer.

When writing inspiration finds me, my immediate thought is can I be bothered? And, for a while now, the answer has been no. Knowing that it will take multiple workdays of effort is enough to dissuade me from starting.

This is not a state of affairs that I’m happy about. I would like to produce more words per month, since quantity begets quality.

Bleets are an attempt to remedy this problem. I intend to write bleets that are:

  • shorter and more narrow in topic
  • less researched and more opinionated
  • unstructured
  • flowery
  • minimally-promoted, if at all
  • sufficiently filled with enough tpyos and grammatical eras to make prescriptivists tantrum like a toddler

I believe that there is still value in hastily written content, for both the reader and the author. Time spent writing is more fruitful than, for example, watching Netflix.

Bleets are a personal experiment in removing friction from desired behaviours. My hope is that by reducing the costs of writing — whether real or just perceived — I will be motivated to produce more writing.

Let’s see how it goes.