What to Blog/Write About
April 15th, 2009 | Posted in blog 11 Comments »
When you first start blogging and even years after you’ve been blogging, the question of what to write about is constantly on your mind. In the past, I’ve followed traditional advice (from people such as Lorelle at WordPress.com) and maintained a specific focus to my blog. I’ve also recommended this strategy to others. In fact, after recommending it to one blogger, she reported that having a specific focus helped her come up with ideas to write about.
This past week I’ve been rethinking the need for a specific focus. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but I had an epiphany the other week about my life, and I looked at my blog and felt that I wasn’t writing the way I truly wanted to write. If someone were to hack into my database and corrupt it, causing me to lose all, I wouldn’t be broken-hearted. A lot of these topics — on technical communication — don’t have a lot of meaning to me.
Which caused me to ask why I’m not writing about things that mean a lot to me. When life is all over, I would like to have written everything I wanted to write. Otherwise, what’s the point of spending so much time blogging/writing?
A lot of writers feel compelled to write a literary novel, or to write poetry or even book-length nonfiction. But for me, I’ve always been fond of the personal essay. I like the honesty of the voice, the realism and the spark of discovery. Philip Lopate, Joseph Epstein, Ian Frazier — these were my literary heroes in graduate school.
I tried to imitate them, but for lack of material, I resorted to too much personal narrative, and it didn’t have the same appeal as the personal essays I admired. My essays were also tough to get published, much less to receive payment for them.
After graduating, I found that in getting a job, technical skills and tool knowledge were valued more than creative writing and literary knowledge, and I moved in that direction for about the next eight years.
My blog helped satisfy my desire to write, keeping my creative side quenched enough to allow me to be a happy procedural writer during the day. In the evenings, ideas for work-related posts came easy — all I had to do was pay attention to the events of the day. My blog helped move my career forward, making me visible in the profession and connecting me with other professionals.
But still, inside, despite the frequent technical communication topics of my blog, it was the personal essay form I wanted to write – the reflective narrative that interweaves personal experience with topical exploration. Personal essays actually fit well with blogs, I think. A good blog post can pass as a personal essay, and a personal essay can pass as blog post.
Personal essays describe a form that can fit around any content, including technical communication. Surely a good many of my posts could pass as personal essays.
But I have varied interests — not just technical communication. Sometimes I like to pick random topics and see what I can make of them, the ideas I can squeeze out. I believe I can start at any point and find something interesting to say. For example, one time while teaching composition as a graduate student, I told students about this idea of starting anywhere and dared them to bring up a topic. A kid held up a walnut with a brand on it. For the next hour we talked about animals on campus, such as squirrels, and whether one should feed them. Heated debates ensued.
More than ideas though, good writing has to tell a story, and I try to see the story even when story isn’t apparent. Story is, I’m convinced, the most important element of writing. A good story doesn’t have to feel anecdotal, or include protagonists and rising action, reaching a climax and turning point, followed by a change of character and denouement. But if you look at events and histories and other ideas, they have a kind of story in themselves. They rub against conflict, evolve to overcome it, and change things as a result.
Audience is another consideration in my writing. You often hear the advice to write for yourself and no one else. I wish I could actually believe that advice. As hard as I try, I can never completely remove the audience from my mind. I’m not explicitly writing for anyone in particular, just a faceless entity who may be reading my writing at some odd hour in the night. Perhaps I should bring my posts as reading material when I go on trips, because as narcissistic as that sounds, that’s what the advice seems to suggest.
But I don’t mind writing for an audience. For me, the experience of writing and reading is about connection. Connection with the Other, as Emmanuel Levinas might say. Whether you write as a form of therapy, to express something inside, as a tool for thinking, or for remembering, below it all is a desire to connect with others. On the deep, philosophical level, I believe we write to overcome the sense of isolation and solitude that haunts us. I know I can’t connect with others until I write about things that first connect with myself.
This week, which is Spring Break here in Utah, I’m going camping down at Wolverine Canyon in Southern Utah. Maybe the four days in the desert — away from technology and my blog — will help me find my writing roots. (I also might be washed away in a flash flood, making the whole question of what to write about obsolete.) But overall, what I’m trying to articulate is that I want my blog to mean more to me than it does. I want my posts to be more significant in my life, to be the content I need to write to have made it all worthwhile. It makes no sense spending hours each week in activity that doesn’t fulfill, in every way, my motive to write. So while I may continue to focus on technical communication, as well as a variety of other topics, my future posts will embrace more of a personal essay form.
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Tags: Creativity, personal essays, Technical Writing
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First up, I am a big fan! Keep up the good work mate. And yes,I have categorised my website into sections differing from tech writing to writing on a lighter vein. And by god, it is fulfilling
.
Regs,
Kooks.
Tom, your post mirrors a common struggle of many blog writers, including me. I have found my solution might lie in starting another blog. It is the path that others like Darren Rowse have taken and I now intimately understand why. Creative people (artists, writers, musicians) are always between the twin towers of commercial success and the personal muse. Bridging the gap between the two is not impossible but often the muse calls us to depart from commercial success. I hope that the time away will bring you the answers you seek and by golly if you find the way out, please share.
I look forward to it!
Tom, although you may focus on tech comm, you have a gift for often integrating your perspective with some personal aspect of your life. I think that you’re already on your way to fulfilling the transition that you seek. Your blog title says it all, and it opens up possibilities. I appreciate when I acquire technical knowledge from reading your posts, but to be honest, I mostly read them because I like your writing and your stories. Go for it!
There are good points you make. I agree that although many advise to write for yourself, that isn’t going to help you gain interest to your writing from others. You want people to engage with what you are writing about and for that to happen you need to find a common ground between you and your audience.
Good luck with finding your motivation and I think the best cure for this is definitely getting away from it all!
Tom, I appreciate your efforts for posting blogs on variety of tech comm subjects. We all like your posts not only becuase they reflect recent trends but also the way you write them in a story-telling manner. And you can really connect with more by making such valuable postings.
Like others, I enjoy reading about your journey.
I tend to think a lot about audience when I’m writing, too. But maybe what “writing for yourself” means is that you actually do it, and that if you go back and read what you wrote, it would be interesting to you. One of my favorite authors said that he never went back and read his own work, but I think an author’s writing has to be compelling and inviting to him or her first and foremost.
One of those tech writers who also enjoys making things up, I decided recently that I needed to write the things I have in my head even if I never got them published. Like you said, if I get to the end of my life without having written them, I would seriously regret it. And maybe my family would regret it as well.
Tom,
Your essay struck a chord with me. I’m new to blogging. Our blog focuses on technical topics relating to instructional design, technology, and publication in our Web 2.0 world. But I recently had a personal incident that forced me to blur the lines between the technical and the personal.
Writing this particular blog became a cathartic experience for me, relating thethe near loss of my wife’s life while on a remote vacation to the power of Web 2.0 (a blog of sorts) to help me survive emotionally. I was concerned that my colleagues (three of us co-write for the blog) would dismiss the piece as too personal, off-topic, and not all that academic.
But like you said, it was therapy for me to write the piece. The more I wrote, the more sense it made that this really showed value in a way that hadn’t been made obvious in many academic treatments of social networking. It was embedding me in the story, but still exploring a technical topic. So I pressed forth. My colleagues (to my delight) were all for it going online. We’ll see how it goes when it posts.
Hope you survived the Utah slot canyons. They are beautiful.
Hi,
Sorry, I like to be honest.
It seems to me that a substantial amount of blogging is just an excuse to “publish” general “filler” that most respectable and respected publishers would edit out of essays as warble.
To write for writings sake seems to me to be a waste of time and imagination.
I can relate to blogging as a way of conveying professional knowledge, for teaching or passing on relevant information to help enrich peoples lives and promoting better understanding of specific professions or ways of life, but just the to write a list superior sounding words that can be subtracted and compounded to leave space for something useful or even poetic…
Isn’t this the principle aim of Tech comm. Simple,concise, accurate and ultimately readable?
Why is none of this stuff published in a book? Because no-one would buy it.
I think blogging could be rationlized as intellectual messaging. None of that shrtnng of wrds 2 xpress qikly smtn light.More like short paragraphs of accurate language that communicate ideas.
Its so much more skillful to use one word instead of three. Just read a sentence from any PG Wodehouse piece, its pure art…
“…To Lord E the park and gardens of Blandings were the nearest earthly approach to paradise. Freddie, chaffing at captivity, had mooned about them with an air of crushed gloom which would have caused comment in Siberia.”
You can just breath the creativity in that. In so few words you can perceive precisely what PG wants you to.
When writing bloggs perhaps it would help to imagine how PG might.
Nick, your comments are thought-provoking and you have a good point. I write for the sense of fulfillment that it brings me, so in this respect, it’s somewhat selfish. I have been reading more books lately (rather than blogs) and you’re right that the information is more substantial. However, blogs are a great way to stay updated about trends, issues, and other timely information. If you’d like to write a guest post expressing your criticism, I’d be happy to consider it.
Thanks for the compliment Tom. I’m sure it would be an honor to be a guest poster in your extensive “blog”.
Err…What does this involve?
BW
Nick