I don’t learn well by following instructions or watching someone else do something. I’m one of those people who has to actually try a new thing myself before it sinks into my brain. That’s just the way I roll and it always has been. That’s not likely to change at my age.
I hate Gutenberg. I hate the idea of having to use it. I feel like it’s a terrible editor for actual writers and is going to interfere with the entire writing process, even if I should ever master it. The writing process is holistic (at least for me it is), and Gutenberg is anything but holistic. It’s like building a freaking Lego building. Blocks are fine, even fun — but they’re not friends to writers.
The Lego block version of the sort of post I might write using Gutenberg “blocks.”
So I decided to start a dummy blog. Yes, a crash test dummy blog just to practice Gutenberg and see what I really think of it. Hey, it can’t hurt. A dummy blog cost me nothing, and I can practice using the dreaded new editor without totally fucking up my current blog.
You can’t see my dummy blog. It’s set to private. It doesn’t even have a proper name. I called it “My Dummy Blog.” How creative is that? I wrote one blog post so far using Gutenberg. The post I wrote is sheer nonsense, word salad really, and you wouldn’t want to read it. I still hate Gutenberg. But at least I got sort of an idea about the feel of using the thing. Do I think I could actually master it? Yes, eventually. But I can already tell it’s astronomically unlikely I’ll ever like using it, and as a result, I won’t be motivated to blog. I’ll keep practicing and see if that ever changes but I doubt it.
If you’re curious about trying Gutenberg but are like me and afraid to try it on your real blog because it might wind up FUBAR, start a dummy blog like I did, and just play around with it. If you completely make a mess of things, it won’t matter.