The Blogger's Secret promises two posts a day, every day, for six months. That means - assuming that you get some slack on weekends - that you are producing 10 items a week and 260 separate documents over a six month period. One way to make this happen is to take 1 of those 10 posts and make them all variations on a theme.
There must be 50 ways to leave your lover (Paul Simon)
You are unlikely to know at the beginning of this effort precisely how many entries of what kind will go into each category, or even, for that matter, what the categories are going to be. That should not stop you from working out some kind of schedule that lets you start work on a whole series of posts ahead of time, so that you can think of one piece of the world you are writing about all at once, and not find yourself surprised when the morning comes and you have nothing to say and you expect to post two things by the end of the day.
Once a week, whether you need it or not
One structure for repetition is to find one of these ten slots in a week and dedicate it on a given day of the week to a certain topic. For the local food blog, for instance, you know ahead of time that you are going to go to the farmer's market on Saturday morning, and so you have a template of sorts of the kinds of things you want to write about every week - at the very minimum, some structure for the notes you want to take about what you see there, and if you are prepared to look ahead into the future some anticipatory writing about what you'll see in August or February or April.
Last year, for instance, you managed to make it to the market once in the bitterest cold of February, and you found apples, rutabaga, donuts, and other [non-perishable root vegetables]. Compared to the bounty of October, that's a bitter harvest, but if you look forward to it now before the cold and dark sets in you can draft the anticipatory seasonal celebration of microwaved frozen donuts topped with applesauce and ice cream, eaten with gloves on in the warm glow of a bright orange propane heater. Write that scene in the summer, post it as a draft to go out February 15, and then make sure that you are there to experience it in real life.
It's keeping me waiting
One repeated post every single week produces a column in your grid of posts to put out. Every Tuesday, my repeated efforts to repeat myself start to pay off, as some themes which are too long for a single post get explored over time. You probably don't want to commit to 10 different weekly posts on 10 different unconnected items, and some things will by necessity overlap, but the process of writing ahead for things that haven't happened yet and pacing yourself so that there's a couple pieces ready to go when the time comes work really well when writer's block hits (as it inevitably will).
Thanks
Thanks to Bill Tozier for the insight.
Some of this slot-filling design comes from conversations with Vero Christensen and Judith Meskill.
The donut sundae recipe originates with Brian Kerr and Arborwiki's Donut Project.
Propane heater illustrated below from Amazon for reference.
For next week
Douglas Hofstadter's GEB is the source for Subjunctivision.
Comments