Writing Blogs

Well, many of you have been watching this blog, and probably watching others blog night after night, week after week, but have you guys ever tried to write a blog? At first blush, writing a blog may be relatively easy for some, but if you write day after day (even though I have been missing days lately...) especially if you are not a particularly gifted writer (me), you will periodically run out of interesting things to discuss. Writing blogs are kind of like writing in a diary, but with an eye towards others reading what you have to say. My goal is to provide useful information for many of you and I try to provide some version of humor throughout the writing too. In light of that, let's get down to writing blogs...

This week we are going to briefly cover some common blogging issues. The first one is.....wait.....wait for it.... wwwaaaiiittt..... Procrastination.... Yup, you got that right. If you have something interesting to talk about, it is very easy to sit down and write a brief article, but if you are tired, and didn't do your homework (aka research...) sitting down in front of a blank computer screen is just as difficult as a writer with writer's block sitting down in front of a blank sheet of paper... (in the olden days of typewriters and pen and paper...). Technically, bloggers are supposed to write a series of articles and schedule them for posting going forward. That is great if you have a whole series of interesting topics to write about. The problem is if you are a procrastinator (or even an occasional procrastinator like me...). If you procrastinate, by the time you are sitting down in front of that blank screen, you are tired, and you continually find SOMETHING else to do.

There is always something else far more important than trying to determine a story line for your current blog. Again, if you have something significant to say, it is no problem to sit down and write, actually you want to write to get the information out of your head and onto the website. I find writing it so much easier when I have a solid topic, and if I have researched that topic. The problem is when my brain runs dry and I don't have a good picture of what you are interested in hearing about. The biggest problem with procrastination is that once you start writing, you may end up with a lot of blather (technical term...) and not much content for your readers.

One way to beat the procrastination problem is to keep a running list of topics you would like to cover in your blog. That does not mean that you have to write everything you have on your list, but keep a running list of ideas so when you do bump into that writer's block, you can refer to that list to shake some ideas loose. Another trick I use is to gather articles I find interesting and keep them in a file.

The concept of keeping interesting articles is not to plagiarize them, but to again spark ideas for you to research and blog about. For starters, why was the article interesting to you? What was it that caught your attention? Was it news worthy? Was it funny? If you liked it, then perhaps your readers would like to hear more on that topic or a similar topic. I recommend that when you use an article for inspiration, make note of it on the article, so that you do not accidentally duplicate your efforts a few weeks or months down the road. There may be times you want to re-visit the topic, but at least if you have made notes on the original article and any corresponding research, you know where you left off and where you can begin again.

Tomorrow we will cover another stumbling block to writing blogs and another possible way around the stumbling block.

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Until tomorrow...