What I’ve Learned So Far

Sometimes people ask me for advice on writing in general, or on blogging in particular. Even though this could be considered a dubious move on their part, I’m happy to oblige, because (a) I like giving advice, and (b) I do think I’ve learned a thing or two about writing by this point.

The specific advice at hand — that you work in batches — is particularly useful when it comes to writing blog posts. Other forms have different demands, and may not suit themselves to batch completion:

• If you’re writing poems, you may need to revisit them many times to get the rhythm and flow right.
• If you’re writing novels, their length will prevent you from writing them back-to-back in a sitting.
• If you’re writing scholarly papers, you’re likely to build them up over time, footnote by footnote, rather than dashing off several — even in draft — at a sitting.

Blog posts, by contrast, are made for immediacy. You have an idea, you write it up, maybe find an image to go along with it, . . . and presto, you have a finished post.

One of the barriers that I’ve run into in my own blogging history — I know I’m not alone in this — is the self-imposed pressure to make a post Deep, or Significant, or Good Enough, or Especially Meaningful. Allowing this barrier to stay in place is, in my experience, a great way to be a crappy blogger.

The antidote is to get very used to plowing through a post from soup to nuts and then hitting “Publish” — all at once, all in a sitting, and multiple times in a sitting when you can manage it. It’s like hitting a whole bucket of balls with one club at the driving range, even though during an actual round of golf you wouldn’t normally hit 25 shots in a row with just your driver or your 6-iron.

Keep this in mind: the timestamp feature in modern blogging software makes it effortless to hit “Publish” over and over in one session without bombarding your audience with a ton of posts in a short period. Just date your posts to appear later so that you can spread out all the posts from one session over the coming week / month / whenever.

Or, for that matter, don’t publish the posts at all, if you think they’re not good enough. But write them anyway, under the assumption that you’re going to need to write a bunch of posts — good, bad, or mediocre — before you can start reliably turning out good ones. Save your bad efforts to revise later, or just chuck them in the bin.

But — whatever you do — get cracking.

~

(Image by if winter ends, used under a CC-Noncommercial license.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 10:44 am and is filed under Writing.