Blogger's Secret

Publish quickly, edit at leisure, make the first version coherent.

Publish quickly. The network rewards the first person to show up on the scene to describe what is going on, and it's important to get a version of that story underway promptly. 

Edit at leisure. The editing process takes time, and it shouldn't be unduly rushed. If necessary, work at it one paragraph at a time, and publish each paragraph after it is finished. Every single piece of work can be improved at any time by an edit.

Make the first version coherent. A first version that stands alone and accurate to itself might just be a concise headline and a lead paragraph. Each subsequent edit can grow the whole thing, but the first thing that hits the wire should be so fully composed that there would be no more reason to keep working on it.

 

Short electric bursts of writing, captured and tamed

Blogging lends itself to short electric bursts of writing - longer than a typical Twitter message, but still shorter than what typically goes into an extended discourse on a topic. Many of my blog entries are impossibly short, just a few words that hint at a topic and move on.

Every so often it's worthwhile to step back and realize that just because the input box on your screen has room for 140 words doesn't mean you can't drag it a bit larger and make it handle 500 words or more at one go. With practice, you can even start to organize your work and your thinking so that not all of it fits on the single page. After all, the internet doesn't fit on one page any more, and you're used to vacuuming up ideas and connecting them together in unexpected ways. This would be no different.

It's also OK to start writing, fill up a page, and then hack away at the text so that half of it is gone by the time you are done. The "shitty first draft" that Anne Lamott writes about depends crucially on the ability of the writer to suppress their editorial instincts just long enough to get something down that covers the page, without worrying too much that the words are precisely or even approximately useful. Filling the page with ink assures you that at least a few of the words are reusable, that some colorful combination of characters makes for a scrap or snippet usable elsewhere, or just that the brain has been kicked into writing mode long enough to live there for a while and turn off the edit mode that threatens to erase it.

It's OK not to have every bit of writing be a bite-sized gem. For one thing, not every complex subject lends itself to sparkling insights. You may have to slog through dozens of detailed examples to convince the reader that there's something going on which is worth their extended attention, in ways that don't all unfold in neat crystalline format.

 

How to write about anything

The original conceit for Blogger's Secret was that it was possible to become an expert on any topic by sheer diligence and frequent public writing on a narrow topic. Sometimes, though, you find yourself needing to write about something you aren't yet an expert on, and that topic could be anything - including something you know little or nothing about.

How can you write about anything and everything? It's surprisingly straightforward. Use your first set of writing efforts toward identifying your own personal ignorance about a topic, and begin by identifying questions that you and anyone would need to be able to answer in order to dig in further. A properly framed set of questions will signal your curiousity, attention, and interest in a topic, without requiring you to know all of the answers immediately.

Writing for the net gives you a special opportunity to create a work which is a series of questions, and where the answers to those questions get worked out over time as you and the people who read what you are writing identify the gaps. Frequently asked questions, with or without answers, are always a good start at addressing a topic. Fill in the gaps until the number of question marks on the page is less than the number of periods.

Thanks to Roger Rayle for the prompt to address this question. Chris Locke gets credit for the "question mark node" phrase in an old post to the Vacuum mailing list. Thanks to everyone who contributed to Usenet era Frequently Asked Questions, as good a technique (and sorely missed) for collecting ignorance in advance of collecting wisdom, especially Mark Moraes who helped produce my "What is Usenet? A second opinion" FAQ for many years.

 

Convince yourself that you can write about anything

If you know nothing about a topic when you start writing about it, use the writing process as a way to locate just enough of a toehold in the subject so that you can ask a good question that advances the understanding of the subject you are addressing.

The lazy blogger finds that someone else has done a thorough job of writing up an event or a subject, and tries to rewrite someone else's work as their own. The diligent blogger treats any account, no matter how detailed, as just the starting point for asking some question not previously anticipated. There is always some way to advance the story, even if it's only at the periphery.

What questions are left unasked? There is always one more thing to say. 

Reading through old drafts that were never posted

When I write, I sometimes get stuck half way through and end up not publishing the thing which seemed to be so promising when it was started.

Your drafts folder should be a source of inspiration. Did you mean to write something insightful, and find yourself wandering off into nonsense? Pick out the best paragraph, copy it into a fresh piece, and start over. No one need know that your insight came and went months ago.

Why do you write?

Perhaps you are writing because you have an assignment due, and you need to complete it by a certain time. That is the straightforward writing requirement. It's also not usually the reason that people start blogging.

Perhaps you are writing because you need to write in order to think, and the process of writing slows down your thinking to the point where it starts to make sense. If you type faster, then you think just a little bit faster, but you can't type as fast as the words just tumble out of your brain, so you get a chance to edit a bit before they land on the screen.

Perhaps you are writing to attract attention to your ideas, or to the ideas of someone else you are working with. It may be less about having something of your own to say, and more about locating someone else who would be interested in the topic at hand.

I'm writing this down so that I can remember it. The Internet is curious in that it's a good way, sometimes, to publish things in relatively obscure places where the very small amount of attention you get for your words right away is balanced by your own ability in the long run to remember what you were thinking months or years later.  

If the Google is correct, I have not yet asked the question "why do you write?" By publishing this, I fix that, so that the next time I want to know why I thought I was doing this I can look it up.

Write ahead when you are on a roll

Sometimes it's very easy to write, and the words just flow out. (Coffee helps for me, but you may have your own particular writing tools and environment that are particularly productive). It's important to capture these times as best you can.

Schedule work to post in the future. With good blogging software, you can capture a whole set of individual pieces of writing as separate posts, and then use the software's scheduling system to actually have them go to the public in the near future. If your Sunday night writing session is amazingly productive, instead of wasting all of those words on people the same night, you spread them out so that they are ready over the next few days.

Write things down that aren't ready to go. Writing ahead helps if you know that you need some editing help before the words are fully baked. Type things in as fast as the keys will help you out to get things down, and then save as a draft so that you can do back and fix up things that were only roughed in.

If you have enough of a buffer of half-done pieces queued up, you can always be ready to publish something at a moment's notice, hopeful some of it which actually has some thought to it. That's much harder if you are also trying to be timely or relevant, but hopefully some part of your world is predictable enough that you can work ahead and still be eventually just in time.

500 words a day by 10:30 a.m. is part of this blogger's secret

My secret blogging routine is to get up, get the kids to school, get a cup of coffee and start typing. 500 words later, I have something that can go to an editor, with a 10:30 a.m. deadline. It's generally published by 11:30 a.m. That, plus email, takes care of the morning. Things that take time to write or a lot of telephone calls or research or records searches or anything clever get done in the afternoon.

Identifying a workable routine and then sticking to it is part of the secret. If you get one thing written about a subject every morning, then you have the whole rest of the day to write something else on topic. All else is commentary.

I measure my success by my word count (at least 500 words, but not too many) and by my ability to meet a deadline. The ideal story is posted precisely at 10:30 a.m., is completely edited with no need to change or omit words, and has a nice photo or video and a solid first paragraph when it's excerpted to Facebook and a solid title when it goes to Twitter. But mostly, it's done and out of the way.

learn a mobile interface to your online systems

One simple way to keep up productivity in writing is to make sure that you figure out how to write when all you have is a mobile phone. The biggest advantage to being able to post something when you don't have a laptop open is that you can have a chance to capture observations when you are on the move. No need to lug a laptop out, and no need to interrupt your writing for a search for wifi or a power outlet. I am writing this from the typepad mobile interface, and I am pretty sure wordpress has something similar. Many systems let you Email in entries as well. Be prepared to go back and edit afterwards to insert links and other decorations. But use down time, like time sitting on the bus, for capture and sharing of things that you would forget when you sat down.

Bird by bird, brick by brick: writing one piece at a time

(Anne Lamott)
(Derek Mehraban)
(Brian Kerr)
(Johnny Cash)

not building a wall, but making a brick
bird by bird, buddy, take it bird by bird
one piece at a time, and it didn't cost me a dime

incremental development
iterative design
small wins

repetition