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.