This story about Justin Hall who quit blogging his life after roughly 11 years of spilling his guts online struck a chord with me. Investing large amounts of one’s personal life into art can be an exhausting process. For all of those journal comics that maintain a daily or near-daily output the parallels to personal blogging are obvious and I imagine, burnout is a real possibility.
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I don’t do a journal webcomic, but I have been drawing a cartoon a day, off and on, since high school – for two-thirds of my life. Right now I have a daily webcomic and a fanfiction site where I draw a cartoon two to four times a week. Some days it’s a job to come up with one cartoon. I know burnout, burnout is a friend of mine; I tell myself I’ll never miss a daily update – let alone weeks or months at a time – of Arthur, King of Time and Space for twenty-five years, but I’m waiting to see what happens. On the other hand, some days it’s hard to hold myself to only one cartoon per website, but I do it because I don’t want my or the audience’s expectations inflated and because I don’t want to wear myself out. I wonder whether bloggers would be well served by similar restraint.