Wrap-up for the Spanish Civil War series

The previous post on this blog marked the end of my series on the Spanish Civil War. When I set out to write this stuff I was really excited about diving into the subject. I felt comfortable with the research and writing I did. But ending the series proved a little more difficult.

This is what I like about writing: to me it’s all about discovering, researching and thinking. The actual written piece is just a by-product of the whole process. So, once I had finished my ‘research’ the drive to write it down dropped significantly. I still wrote it of course and I’m happy with the result, but the original drive had disappeared. The whole point of this blog is not writing but thinking.

If you have something you care about, something you find very interesting—like I do history—then I advise you to write about it. No matter what you write, it’s a great experience and a great way to dive into it deeper.

Writing a series of posts

I really enjoyed writing the series, but writing a string of posts has some downsides:

• the blog loses it’s ‘blog’-feel, as updates are quite infrequent; it becomes more of a ‘magazine’
• longer articles stringed together are harder to read than shorter ones
• not wanting to break the series kept me from writing other stuff

The gaps between the individual posts were a bit too large for my liking, as I had to refocus every time I wanted to continue writing. I can only imagine how it must be for the readers’ liking. Moreover, in between posts I had to urge to write some shorter pieces on different subjects as I came across interesting facts or ideas. I didn’t want to break the chain of the series though, so I found myself not writing those. I want to prevent that in the future too.

In conclusion, although I will continue writing series of posts, they will not be very frequent nor as long as this one.

The whole article

I have put together all the posts from the series and combined them into one master article to rule them all. This document contains some minor changes here and there, some pictures and some nice quotes to spice it up a bit. So check it out (PDF).