With my blog more out of view than has been in the past, I’m finding that I approach writing with less urgency. This is a good thing, I think, but I will need to establish an entirely “private” writing practice if I want to make any thing of it.

That is, I need to start thinking about writing more “publishable” pieces. I have put those two words in scare quotes to signal the uneasy tension between them and their difference from the mood of blogging. When I am writing a blogpost, as I am doing now, I almost feel like I’m thinking out loud, in public. In fact, my catchy title (of which I am at this moment still quite proud but may feel differently by the end) came to me while writing the first sentence of this paragraph. Blogging isn’t something we do in private and posting isn’t quite publishing. And writing essays and books has an altogether different feel.

It requires days and weeks of lonely work, unobserved by others, sometimes making progress, sometimes losing ground. None of the struggle is visible to the reader except as a trace in the final product, often seen mostly in its imperfections. (Hopefully, most of the struggling ends up being successful, and therefore invisible.) There is some legitimate concern these days about the private/public distinction, the erosion of our privacy by forces outside of us. But perhaps we also need to understand the practices that maintain our privacy from the inside and, perhaps ironically, this doesn’t mean withdrawing from the world, staying out of public view. Rather, it means carefully selecting, in private, what to share with others, through publication.

This idea that publishing a work properly, not merely posting it to the internet, constitutes an “interiority,” a privacy of the mind, is interesting to think about. It’s also an experience that I don’t give myself often enough. I like to think that I have a rich and interesting inner life, but, truth be told, I don’t work on it, I don’t elaborate it, nearly enough in prose. I need to set aside some hours in the morning to dwell upon my private thoughts with a public in mind. And the best way I know of to do this is to write down what I think for someone I respect. That is the basic scene of good prose writing.

I once somewhat bitterly suggested that, in this age of “surveillance capitalism” (and, indeed, “central intelligence,”)

if you want your privacy, you have to keep it like a secret.

As invective against a certain kind of governance, I still think this is a nice way of putting it. But I need to go at this more constructively, with a healthier attitude. In fact, I need a more durable, longterm strategy. As an individual, then, maybe the best way to maintain your privacy is to open it

like a book.