Blogger's Secret

Who are you? Writing yourself into existence

When you're producing a steady stream of writing, people who know you only via the networks will start to think of you first by what you write. This is an opportunity for you to be someone who you want to be rather than looking back on things that you used to be.

The confident writer who is blogging without an editor has to exercise their own editorial judgment about what to cover, how to approach it, and how many words to devote to that subject. When everything is working as it should be, your personal voice will come through. Practicing that voice regularly is part of the Blogger's Secret approach - your ten writing assignments a week don't all have to be done at once, but they do have to come out as some organic whole that gives someone who is following along a well-rounded perspective on who you are and what you are interested in.

I am interested in writing, mostly writing to a specfic deadline, and mostly writing short pieces rather than long ones. I'm tired of writing for search engines, where most of the people who read what I wrote don't know me; one of the unstated goals of this project is to accumulate regular readers and not just transient ones. Mostly I'm looking to explore things I've learned from over a decade of blogging routinely, and a way to capture notes to myself in a format that looks like confident suggestions to friends rather than hoary pronounciations of truth from on high.

So who are you, and what do you do? I'm a blogger, and I publish Blogger's Secret, a twice daily weblog dedicated to the idea that you can be an expert on anything in six months by blogging about it twice a day. I'll be collecting not only my own recommendations on how to pull of this kind of pace of writing but also examples from other frequent bloggers on how they structure their days to make this happen.

Establishing an identity as a blogger: differences in writing style and substance

What does it mean to be a blogger, as opposed to being a journalist, a twitterer, a writer, or an author?

Bloggers publish frequently, more frequently at the extreme that any journalist would ever get newspaper ink for, and with more freedom to publish directly without editorial interference.  You can be a blogger at once a month or once every few months if time and circumstances demand, but you can also post twice a day and still not overwhelm the medium.  A challenge is to keep up whatever pace you pick; no editor will demand prose, and no editor will cut your flowery words.

Bloggers can write paragraphs, while twitterers are left to only write sentence fragements.

Bloggers post more first drafts and spend less time in the edit and rewrite and fixup phase.  A blogger can take an event in as it happens, produce some credible real time first draft impressionistic transcript, typoes and all, and move on to the next thing.  There is less room for elaborate wording and craftsmanship and more value on the ability to deal with and capture the now.

Bloggers can be biased, and that's part of their earthy charm.  They don't take up the "fair and balanced" cloak of journalism, and don't often have a funding source and corporate oversight to give them credentials and resources the way journalism traditionally protects its own.  The blogger is more of a loosely affiliated opinion writer, often challenged to their right to be in the meeting.  The better bloggers will acknowledge their biases and conflicts of interest, but you can't even count on that with everyone who self-publishes, in print or online.

Several authors are bloggers on the side, but it's madness to think that you can blog and then cut and paste and edit and put what you have into a book.  The blog as format lends itself to tinier fragments of insight and understanding than book-length chapters, and if you are really writing something that's bookish you'll at the very least have to rethink some structure and edit for style before you go to publication.  Many authors (who?) of non-fiction note that the blog as daily chronicle of their active engagement with their readership inform their work, but you don't expect to see Chapter 6 published as a series of posts.

Bloggers hit the publish button as soon as time is up.

Who are you? Getting the right tone for the "about" section

One ubiquitous design element of every online system - including your blog - is a brief self-description.

It's hard to write, because you're trying to compress some essence of yourself into way too few characters to really give you a unique identity, yet you have to do this so that people know where you fit in their world.

Rather than right just one of these, here's an exercise to help you generate a lot of them; it's one of my MadLibs style strategies (more on MadLibs some other time).

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Find an intro that you like, strip out almost all of the meaningful words, and see what structure is left behind.  Here are some examples.

I’m a [professional title] specializing in [nouns] for [client roles].  I live in  [location] with my [relation], [name], and our [number] year old [noun], [name].  Learn more about my [noun phrase] services at [corporate name].

Welcome to my [noun] blog. I use this blog to provide a commentary on [noun] events occurring worldwide, including the [nouns] themselves, latest research and conferences and meetings. I am [name] the [honorific] Professor at [name] University in [location].

[Name] is a [noun phrase] and  [noun phrase] Consultant. He is an owner / partner of [corporate name].

I helped create the profession of [activity], co-authored  its leading [noun], and was president of its best-known [collective noun] for [number] years.

I've taken this approach to the current "About" section on this blog, which skips the blackout sections for ..., and as that gets refined it'll be easier to understand.  The term of art for the effort spent on this is "identity work", and we engage in it all the time online.