I feel like I've gotten into the spirit of Nablopomo this year more than last.  Last year, I had a bunch of ideas about debugging theory that I wanted to get out in some form, and each day was mostly a matter of figuring out what I wanted to write about.  With a year of on-and-off writing under my belt, and ample opportunity to write on a variety of topics, I find myself more in the position of seeing an interesting article, or video, or problem, and just immediately writing up the ideas that occur to me on the subject rather than doing an extensive pre-analysis and structuring for each post.  To me, that's what Nablopomo is really all about: getting out of the mindset that each post has to be the essence of insight and wit, and instead just turning thoughts into material as quickly and as frequently as possible.

I also have had to face more of the prospect of having nothing to write about, and using that as a springboard to come up with new and better ideas.  It reminds me of what I was taught about doing improvisational theater.  When you first start out doing improv, you cling to certain cliches: humorous "inside" references that the audience appreciates, stock characters and goofy voices that you know will get a laugh, oh-so-clever visual gags, silly plot twists, and of course, potty humor.  These things will get you a laugh or three, but they go against the essence of what good improv consists of, which is the bizarre and incredible stories and gags that a group of people who are all committed to going with whatever gets thrown out there will create when they have nothing planned in advance.

This kind of improv has a very different feel to it, both from the actors' standpoint, and the audience's standpoint.  On stage, you are caught between a lingering concern that the whole thing is going to fall apart (which it sometimes does), and the elation that somehow it just seems to be working.  Off stage, it quickly becomes clear that anything could happen at any moment and you watch with greater fascination wondering how it's all going come together, at least that's been my experience.  You don't encounter that many groups who can totally avoid preplanning what happens in the scene because of the associated fear.  It's hard to walk out on stage and just start pantomiming and talking and hope for the best.  However, after you do it for a while, and you learn some simple tricks for making it work, it becomes so enjoyable and natural that you can't imagine relying on those old planned crutches anymore.

Ideally, that's how I'd like to write blog posts.  You get a suggestion or two from the audience, in this case the many blogs and other websites I read, or the daily problems I encounter in my work, and I just sit down and try to create something right there.  In fact, that's more or less how this post was written.  The idea that I was changing my approach to writing posts occurred to me as a starting topic, but the link between my new approach and theatrical improvisation didn't cross my mind until I was a paragraph in.  Unfortunately, my posts and my improv scenes suffer from the same problem: I was never good at ending things.