This was the question a writing-inclined youngdoctor (UCSF palliative care fellow @lauraekoehn) and I faced recently. She had never blogged and felt ambivalent despite encouragement from our local GeriPal bloggerati, Eric Widera and Alex Smith. I blogged when my book first came out and then, well, I didn’t.

We shared two key hesitations:

• the point is to write quickly but we don’t ever write quickly because our quick writing is less good and why would you want inferior work out there?
• we have both academic and public writing ambitions, aspire to publication in newspapers, literary and medical journals and don’t want to ‘waste’ good ideas on a blog

On the other hand, we could also see the pros of blogging:

1. more writing getting out into the world more often
2. it doesn’t have to be as good (!)
3. most of the time we never finish the so-called great idea pieces we hoped to publish in newspapers and journals
4. it’s the digital age, we should get with the program

Here’s the upshot:

1. Just do it!

• Laura published her first blog post on “Neuropalliative Care: Call to Action and Top 10 Pointers” last week on Geripal
• I published a guest post “The Fundamentals of Medicine: Every Second Counts” on the Gold Foundation Humanizing Medicine blog
• I’m going to aim for once a week, starting today (even though this sounds scarily like a weight loss or exercise resolution, and we know how those turn out…)

2. Blogging is writing, and more writing leads to better writing

• practice will improve the quality of our blogs and our impact
• we will learn that not everything needs to be perfect
• we will find that a blog post is a great first step and that if something warrants an article or story as well, the two are not mutually exclusive

So enjoy…and see you next week, same blogosphere address, same blog time…