If I am being honest about these pieces I write, these little blog posts, here is what I would say:

I feel like I go back and forth between feeling like this might (eventually) be one of the most important (career) things I ever do – to feeling like I am completely wasting my time.

It’s glimmers of decent thought surrounded by a word-salad of noise, writing 1,000 posts to find two good ones.

Honestly, writing can be a mess of an event sometimes.

Who cares. Keep going.

Joan Didion knows what I am talking about…

I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Writers are always: Selling somebody out.

At the very least, we are happy to share people’s secrets.

For example, I remember I had lunch with a certain fellow some years ago.

After catching up we began to talk business.

He casually said: “I don’t know how my competitors do it. But to mitigate commodity risk in this situation, I do X.”

Before I got home, I had a blog post about it all written in my head.

I emailed him the next day to ask if I could quote him on it with, or without, his name being used. When he didn’t email me back in 48 hours, I left his name out, but published it anyway.

Honestly, I am still not sure if that was the right thing to do or not.

Drop me a line if I can share your secrets too.

Of course, I promise to omit your name.

My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem