Blogging Insights # 40 – Blogging vs. Writing

I agree that sports are not a good analogy to blogging, especially for those of us that have never been involved in sports. I don’t think watching baseball counts as involvement.

Blogging is writing. There are as many types of writing as there are writers and genres. From poetry and fiction, to non-fiction, there’s a genre that covers it.

One way or the other, blogging is condensed writing. Regardless of topic, the main thing that differentiates it from other writing is that it lives entirely online and is not published as a book. In response to people who say they’ve seen blogs published as books? I’ve seen them too. They don’t read like books. They don’t even read like essays probably because they were not written as essays. The read like a bunch of blogs all lumped together in binding.

Much of what you get in your writing has to do with your intent when you wrote it. If you are writing for your audience and you’ve been writing to them for a while, you have a sense of what they will probably enjoy. You write what you want to say, but also what you think they will want to read. Sometimes, you write what you want them to read.

I try to keep blog pieces short, generally between 500 and 1000 words. I know my limits as a reader. I try to limit my blogs to an amount I would read. Most of the material I write is similar to “letters,” but to a bigger audience. I write about things that have happened to me or are planned. Some stuff is pulled out of memory. Other items are responses to news, history, remembrances, and inevitably stuff that has happened to me as recently as now.

That’s blogging for me. Short pieces for an online audience. What I write is based on what’s floating my boat this week and I don’t feel obliged to always agree with anyone, including myself. Life is change and as the world spins, my ideas change.

Sometimes blogging is my way of sorting out how I feel about something. Although I have a strongly liberal bias, I don’t want to keep pounding on the same drum. Sometimes, I can’t help myself and I feel if I don’t write about it, I’ll explode. Otherwise, it’s probably something I find interesting and hope might interest others. It might be political or personal. I try not to harp on a one subject for an extended period because I don’t want to be the blogger version of a one-trick pony.

Whatever I write I predict it will be short and focused and will include pictures.

Categories: #Blogging, Anecdote, Challenges