Blogger's Secret

Top 5 reasons to make a list

How many ways do I love making lists in weblogs? Let me count the ways.

1. Lists are easy to write. Each part of the list is as long or as short as it needs to be, and you don't need to pretend to tell a single, coherent story. If you run out of time, you can cut the post short.

2. People like being listed on a top N list of anything, so you get the benefit of people linking to you when you make a list that they are on.

3. It's a very old technique, going back all the way to the Catalog of Ships in Homer's Iliad. (Book 2.)

4. People love pointless numbered bullshit every once in a while.

5. There's a seasonal news trope of doing a "top n" list for the year at the end of the year. If you time your list-making correctly, you can get into the annual list of lists list, guaranteeing you some small manner of recognition.

Categories as a source of inspiration

If your blogging software supports categories, you should be using it to help you track what you are writing about. Divide up the world into some number of roughly equal sized buckets, and go back to each one periodically to refill it.

It's easy to get too many categories, and equally easy to have too few. The best way to manage categories is not to get too worked up about whether something is precisely in the right place; there's no way to be perfectionist about categorization and also write enough. 

My preference is to create too many categories, and then to use them as memory jogging devices so that I know some large set of things that I might want to write down, even if I don't care to keep each one of them updated frequently. If you know that you are capable of publishing something useful on each of a bunch of subtopics in a weblog, then you never need be completely stumped when it's time to write. Work your way down the list until either you see something you'd like to expand upon, or until you note that something is missing that you have an idea about how to fill it.

It's worth writing it down, even if you don't know who the audience is yet

There are times when you need to write something down and publish it, not because you think that you know who needs to see it, but simply because you need to know that you can find it again by searching for it.

The internet is vast and ever changing, and rather than rely on your ability to search for what you once found, try making a copy of the relevant portions (with whatever annotations you need to provide a context). Even a paragraph worth of clipping, when added to a paragraph of insight, is enough of an anchor point that if the original goes missing you can still reconstruct that understanding of your own.

The tradition that you are drawing from is of the commonplace book.  Happily, I wrote about this a few years ago, so now I can quote from myself:

7. Quote from people who you respect. An early writing practice was a "commonplace book", where the literate people of the pre-Xerox, pre-Internet day copied out by hand passages from other works that they wanted to save and make their own. Pieces of poetry, bits of news, copies of messages you want to fix in time, can all go into a blog stream to be commented on and added to. Tip: only quote from people who you respect, because the last thing you want is to be on the top of a search queue for something you don't care anything about.

It looks like Harvard has a nice collection of commonplace books online:

The commonplace book has its origins in antiquity in the idea of loci communes, or "common places," under which ideas or arguments could be located in order to be used in different situations. The florilegium, or "gathering of flowers," of the Middle Ages and early modern era, collected excerpts primarily on religious and theological themes. Commonplace books flourished during the Renaissance and early modern period: students and scholars were encouraged to keep commonplace books for study, and printed commonplace books offered models for organizing and arranging excerpts. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries printed commonplace books, such as John Locke’s A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books(1706), continued to offer new models of arrangement. The practice of commonplacing continued to thrive in the modern era, as writers appropriated the form for compiling passages on various topics, including the law, science, alchemy, ballads, and theology. The manuscript commonplace books in this collection demonstrate varying degrees and diverse methods of organization, reflecting the idiosyncratic interests and practices of individual readers.

A part of the blogging practice is the practice of collection, and the commonplace style is the response to the need to make copies in order to make something your own and for future use.

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.