Blogger's Secret

Repeat yourself for emphasis, and notice the changes over time

I organize a lunch meeting every Thursday, and every Thursday I give roughly the same little introductory speech. We ding a glass at 12:30 p.m. to get people's attention and to get the meeting part of the lunch started. "I'm Edward Vielmetti, and I organize lunch." This first sentence evolved over a long time, and it's the right thing to say every single time I say it, even though people have heard it before quite a few times.

You're invited to lunch, by the way - the details are on the a2b3 lunch group page on Yahoo.

As part of the lunch ritual, we ask everyone at the table to introduce themselves and say a few words about who they are. For some people, self description is simple and direct; their job provides a simple hook to quickly identify themselves to a group of semi-strangers and answers as many questions as it needs to. For others, the description changes subtly and slightly over time, and can even be a dramatic shift as people decide that they want to be someone other than the person they were last month or last year.

It's OK to repeat yourself; indeed it's necessary. If you're building up a body of work, there's a constant need to refer back to themes that run through your writing or through the current state of the field you're covering and refer back to the recent or long-distant past to make it current again. Just be prepared to change your message as needed over time so that the repetition is not a simple mindless boring copy and paste of old text, but rather a way to approach a familiar subject from a new angle.

If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: repetition is the very soul of the net.

Tiny habits produce great results

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?

Repetition is the very soul of the net

If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times: repetition is the very soul of the net.  Be prepared to say the same thing over and over again, using different words when it makes sense to expand your vocabulary and with a different emphasis if the circumstances are novel. The ability to repeat yourself but still write things that are brand-new is a hallmark of a writer who can always recycle their own work and make it fresh and relevant again.

Thinking ahead, thinking now, thinking behind

Timing is a big issue when you are blogging regularly. You want to be alerting people to things that they are interested in and that are interesting to you, and if those things are time sensitive you have some window in which to bring things to people's attention.

There are at least three ways to approach this timing challenge. You can think ahead, providing details of what will be in the future. You can be here now, and take some contemporaneous notes; the live-blogging approach. Or you can be carefully reminiscent about what already happened, so that you can get a chance to go over your notes and makes sense of things that were't obvious at the time you first heard them.

All three approaches are good. If you have attention to divide, then space it out so that the closer you are to the even the more frequent the attention is, and the further away the less you pay attention. There's no magic to that, other than to note that sometimes the best season to be in is 6 months off from where you are now, so that you can simultaneously reminisce and plan ahead and be correct on both accounts.

The daily deadline, randomness, and coherent storytelling

It's very hard to keep up a daily output, but once you can convince yourself that it's possible, a lot of other impossible things start to look possible too.

At times I want to get some randomizing devices to help create the daily construct.  Is it a random page from past output that you expand upon, a random other piece of relevant work to riff off of, or some non-deterministic excuse to expand upon the work of someone else?

There's a phrase I'm sure called "directed randomness" or "orderly randomness" where you carefully choose the space you're randomizing within so as to make it easier to tell a coherent story when you are done.

Scheduling and timing

Death of the net predicted, film at 11.

With modern blogging tools, your twice daily posts can be planned to happen at particular times of day. Though the Internet dissolves some of the boundaries of space and time, chances are that you also want to attract a set of particular people at some particular time with some particular message.

Determine what times of day you are likely to get the best response from your postings.  If you are writing about materials local to a particular place, you'll want to be aware of time zones there, so that you know consciously that you are writing for a mid-day work audience or an evening at-home audience.  If you are writing around a real-world set of events like sports or entertainment, there are deadlines that reflect when people will start to be interested in something and when your opinion is old news.  

You can also attract an audience a regularly scheduled chat session.  A group gathers on Twitter to do the #FOIAchat discussion about the Freedom of Information Act every Friday, which I synchronize with writing a FOIA Friday column at AnnArbor.com.  One day a week for one hour, what I write about is top of the page for some narrow set of people, and so that slice of the schedule is aimed at that time.

Repeat yourself with the seasons

Write about what you wrote about last year at this time. To everything there is a season, and long lived blogs should take advantage of all of the traffic and all of the insightful comments that came about from last year's interesting and timely post.  By posting about morel season when it actually is morel season, you synchronize yourself with a world of other bloggers who come up like mushrooms regularly once a year and then fade back until next season.

That probably needs an edit to remove hyperbole before it goes out, but it's true; my mushroom posts get hits every single year, and every single year I learn a bit more from the search traffic and analytics.  And  it's why I believe in fungal growth, not viral growth, as the biggest blogging strategy if you are in it for the long haul.

Aristotle on repetition

"We are what we repeatedly do."

Once a week, whether you're ready or not: repetitions and variations on a theme

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.

I'll repeat myself, at the risk of being crude
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.

Anticipation is making me wait
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.

Repetition is the very soul of the net

When the net started, there was no web.  If you wanted everyone to have a copy of something you wrote always close at hand, you set up a repeated job to post it out regularly, with whatever minor changes accumulated between those times marked carefully with change bars.  

Repetition is the very soul of the net.  Seasons come and seasons go, and last year's carefully edited notes on where to get election results works really well as a base for this year's post of the same kind.   This week's regular Friday feature or inscrutable Sunday comic are things that you expect to see, even if you don't always understand them.  This month's introduction to what this blog is all about might repeat 80% of what last month's post did, but over time the message changes a little bit and gets better.

And so it's Tuesday, and I'm writing about repetition.  I'm repeating myself, because I've written about repetition before, and I'm already planning to write about repetition next week on Tuesday.  In fact, I've already started writing that piece, and already in it I'm quoting from this week's post which I will have written the week before.   If you say something enough times you get good at it.