Becoming Readywriting: A Blogger’s Journey

Below is the timeline I made for our community talk about blogging here at Reclaim. It goes through the major milestones in my computing life, through the various iterations of my blog(s), etc. It’s about when and a bit of why, but it’s not the whole story. 

It never is, is it? 

Here’s where my story starts: I love to write. I have always loved to write. My handwriting is awful, I almost failed kindergarten because I couldn’t hold a pencil properly, but I always loved words. And when I was able to write words and sentences and stories, well, I never stopped. I was always writing or reading. I kept a journal in high school, spending hours and hours of (what I now know is) ADHD insomnia writing pages and pages and pages. I wrote press releases for my swim team and the local paper published them. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of poems. I started writing countless novels. 

And I wrote online. A lot. 

If reddit had been a thing, I would have been on reddit, but there wasn’t, so I commented on all sorts of weird internet things that existed in the late 1990s online, stuff that is long gone. I went to university, in part, to become a journalist. I wrote copy and technical manuals and advertorials and advice columns and features and and and and. If it could be written, chances are, I either took a course in how to write it or had to write it as one of my paid internships. I kept writing in grad school (because what else do you do in comparative literature?), kept writing while looking for a job, kept writing when I found the job, kept writing when I was back to being contingent. 

Readywriting was born when I decided I wanted to write for myself again. 

But there were bills to pay, so I wrote as myself as readywriting, but also for online publications, for companies that offered me some money but also free services to write about them, for tech start-ups, for whoever would (at first) give me exposure (shudder) and then whoever would pay me. When I started blogging at Inside Higher Ed, the editor told me he fielded multiple angry emails and phone calls from very important people at very important universities demanding to know “who does she think she is?” I blurted out, I’m f’ing nobody, and that’s the point.”

I blogged and I tweeted (which usually led to more blog posts) and I connected and conversed and learned and listened and shared and blogged and blogged and blogged. And wrote. To me, whether it was online, on my blog, in a journal, on some other publication, it was all a part of the same project of writing. I often joke that I wrote myself into existence, that my overall project was me, but there is a lot of truth to that. I blog, therefore I am. 

(Also, all my online friends and I have been relatively recently been diagnosed with some neurodiverse condition, which may have been why we all connected so strongly, even online, but may also explain why I write so much - it’s my ADHD superpower.)

What I love about blogging and generally writing online is that it doesn’t have to be linear, and side-quests (the OG ADHD tell) are welcome. I write because I have all the words and they spill out of me through the keyboard and through my voice (if I’m not writing, I’m probably talking) and lots of different places like different parts of my story and what I am trying to say at that moment on that day, while other places are better for whatever side-quest to the side-quest I happen to be on. 

This doesn’t help you, the reader, blog more. I am terrible at giving writing advice because my own experience is so idiosyncratic as to be almost useless to anyone trying to apply it to their own lives. So I guess that’s my piece of advice: screw the advice and do what works and feels right to you. Keep a journal. Write guest posts on a friend’s blog. Become a vlogger (or whatever they’re calling themselves these days). Hell, start a podcast! 

One more piece of advice: you have something to say that no one else in the world can say like you do. You have ideas, experiences, knowledge, positionality, perspectives that other people want to hear, hell, need to hear. Your words are the words someone out there doesn’t even know yet that they need to read or hear. Write because you want to, but also write because your words matter. 

Lee Skallerup Bessette absolutely hates writing short bio blurbs about herself in the third (or even the first) person. She is the assistant director of digital learning at the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University. She edits the National Teaching and Learning Forum. She coaches swimming. She sews her own clothes. She has ADHD. She is a parent to two neurodivergent teens. She has two dogs. She’s written and edited books, but she’s not that kind of author. She’s also not that kind of doctor. She grew up in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Yes, she does speak French. No, she does not have an accent. Yes, she will bore you to death if you ask about Quebec language and politics (ask around). And now that she's a middle-aged, Gen-X woman, you can bet she’s started writing online about all that fun stuff. 

In other words, she contains multitudes. Hence, all the blogs.