Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
Untitled, Olaf Rude, 1938
I talked to a friend who wants to start a blog, and she pulled a few thoughts from me:
It is what is odd about you that is interesting. If you work hard, you will be able to write like everyone else in your genre, but the result will never be rich as the texture of your own personality. So, don’t think too much about how you are supposed to write, how others do it, or what the conventions demand. Just try to amuse yourself.
Your contradictions are an asset. You’re a lover of classical English architecture and you’re also a dirty little punk—expressing both at the same time is more interesting than sharing just cute pictures of English gardens or just wild trashy stuff. The more you incorporate everything that you love and that comes easily for you, your interests, your sense of humor, your grammatical tics, etc, the more your style emerges.
A classic pattern: you try hard to write like someone else, but then you mess up and write in some stupid other way, and that ends up being what people relate to. I wish I had messed up sooner.
People tend to sound more like themselves in chat messages than in blog posts. So perhaps write in the chat, rapidly, to a friend.
Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter. Write to experience what you care about in higher resolution, write to enhance your feeling of aliveness.
One reason chat messages are unusually lively is that the format encourages you to write from emotion. You are talking to someone you like and you want to resonate with them, you want to make them laugh. This creates a surge in the writing. It is lovely. When you write from your head, your style sinks back under the waves.
This, however, is not an excuse to be lazy in your thinking. You have to put your thoughts in order. But the time to do this is before you write for publication. Think: musicians practicing hard so they can be in the moment when they improvise. Read, take notes, study, question yourself. But then, when writing a post, let that go, and rely on the brain power you have accumulated. A good essay is an interesting mind wrestling with a problem in somewhat real-time. (I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.)
Don’t aim too high when you write your first posts. Maybe just do 500-word pieces, and do them with a simple format.
A simple format: “Here is a problem I had and here’s how I solved it.” (Or, “I haven’t solved it yet but these are some reflections.”) Having a problem to solve, or a question that demands an answer, makes the text live and move. Otherwise, it is just a clump of words, and it is unclear why I should read on.
Another simple format is a list, like this essay.
Write a hundred pieces. Each time take one thing and make it better: a better title, better structure, better ending, better descriptions, better dialogue. Just one thing. It adds up.
To grow skilled, you need to push yourself outside your comfort zone and put your goals a little beyond what you can pull off. But also? You need to finish and publish stuff because there are certain things you can only learn by finishing. Deadlines are the tool I use to balance this tradeoff. I tell myself, “I’m going to write the best piece I can in 20 hours” and then I adjust how high I aim and how hard I judge myself so I can finish in 20 hours. If I want to push myself to go deeper, I give myself 30 hours instead. If I want to get more reps, I give myself 10 hours. And so on. This excludes most of the research work, which I do separately from writing essays.
Look at Kafka’s diary. Look at what he did when he felt one of his drafts sucked. He didn’t rewrite the sentences, moving commas and phrases around. He flipped a page and wrote a new draft from scratch. This is a way to learn from your attempts without sacrificing the life that comes from writing fast. Kafka could give himself the same prompt four or five times and run off in new directions each time.
You should, of course, edit once you have a good draft. Find sharper words, make it tighter, and ensure you are saying what you mean. But don’t edit too much.
A good question to ask yourself when you edit: what is the weakest 20 percent of this draft? Cut it.
What if you want to write 5000 words about the history of French grammar but fear people will get bored by that? What should you do? You should write 5000 words about the history of French grammar. It will filter your readers so you attract those who appreciate the grooves of your mind.
Writing a blog is not like writing for a publication. There is no preexisting audience you have to please. The audience is created as a reflection of your curiosity. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.
In real life, you can’t go on and on about your obsessions; you have to tame yourself to not ruin the day for others. This is a good thing. Otherwise, we’d be ripping each other's arms off like chimpanzees. But a blog is a tiny internet house where you decide the norms. And since there are already countless places where you can't be yourself, there is no need to build another one of those. The law of the land is that everything you think is funny is funny. Those who find the texture of your mind boring or offensive can close the tab, no need to worry about them. It is good for the soul to have a place where being just the way you are is normal. And it is a service to others, too. You'll be surprised how many people are laughably similar to you and who wish there was a place where they felt normal. You can build that.
Being able to spin up a room of your own with a few clicks is one of the great advantages we have over previous generations. Make use of it.
See also:
“How I wrote ‘Looking for Alice’”, “On having more interesting ideas”, “Writing in a way that gets your thoughts to flow”, and “How I write essays”
Thank you for help with the edits, Esha
Thanks, Henrik, for this wonderful list of ideas. Recently I thought a lot about what I should write about and this post was an invitation to discard thoughts about which ideas have an inherent audience and to just focus on writing about the things I actually think about all day. If there is no audience for that - fine. But it's pointless to talk with a censored voice.
Great post! Love this: “Just try to amuse yourself.” Sometimes the draft just doesn’t work and the telltale sign is when I’m not having any fun and just pushing myself to finish it.
From my experience, abandoning the draft and starting over sometimes works as a solution, but more often than not, I need to abandon the whole theme and write about something entirely different to get back into the fun zone.