One of the side effects of working with BJ Fogg in his three tiny habits program is a renewed pragmatic focus on how I can regularly produce small units of publishable work. Simply knowing that one thing (cleaning the kitchen) has to happen before another thing (blogging) is enough to make it more likely that both get done.
What's the smallest thing that you can do regularly that would have a big impact on your ability to write?
The comment is better than the story, so quote from the comment
Newspapers have grown to grudgingly embrace commentary, and have spent a lot of time trying to attract people to leave comments on their site. If you are unlucky, the commentary is awful; if you are lucky, one comment in two is worth reading, and perhaps one in twenty is better than the story itself.
The practice of blogging lends itself to well-sourced quotations from other sources. If the comment is better than the story, then lead with your well-linked clip of the comment itself. How much more fun it is to pull the good discussion out of the morass, even if the lede is barely noteworthy.
This inspired by Jordan Miller's plea for more sandwich stories (and fewer pet stories) in one of Ann Arbor's online publications. Since I make or eat perhaps a dozen sandwiches in a week, I'm all for this.
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