Thoughts on Blogging

This post will not be about North Dakota, Fargo, Snow, or anything else related to those subjects. I promise.

Today I’m going to think out loud a bit about blogging.  Andy Drish has a very good post about blogging over at his site called, “Change Your Life – Start a Blog.”  Blogging has had a profound effect on many people’s lives, and certainly has changed mine.  Andy’s post basically chronicles how he came into blogging and his early struggles with the medium:

I was clueless. So Mike [Note: a fellow blogger - ed.] started teaching me the basics… And I hated it. For two reasons: 1) I had nothing to write about. 2) I sucked at writing . . . Being a bad writer with nothing to write about isn’t the best foundation to start a blog.

Id.  Luckily, most people who stick with blogging eventually learn to create posts built upon what other people have written, but with their own analysis.  Nevertheless, I think most people go through phases where they don’t know what to write, or question whether people want to read what they’ve written.

It is unquestioned that writing a meaningful post is most difficult when your first begin, but I also think this is an ongoing struggle for authors.  [Based on my last week of posts, I do not mean to say that my posts are meaningful for other people, but rather that they are mostly my own work.]  I’m not sure what the trick is to winning this struggle.  I could be to find a muse of some sort to get you started [read: North Dakota this last week] or it could also be a community you have become involved and invested in [for me this includes primarily the WGOM Community and fellow bloggers I know on a personal level such as Andy or J.M. Verville].

Of course Andy quickly started writing about things he is very passionate [and very good at cultivating]:

But I quickly realized that blogging isn’t just about writing. It’s about ideas. And conversation. And relationships. But mostly… blogging is about people.

Id.  Andy is clearly right.  I think blogging is largely about finding your particular niche and exploring it while building personal relationships.  Originally when I started blogging [at a prior domain which has long since lapsed] I had one goal: to get practice writing.

Over the years, I do think I’ve had plenty of practice, but that practice was not the great intellectual pursuit I was searching for.  More and more the writing that I do has become secondary to my participation in online communities.  Writing in a vacuum is not much fun.  Conversing with people about what you each have written is much more rewarding.  It took me a long time to learn this lesson, and Andy is right: blogging is more about the people than the actual writing.

So take Andy’s advice: Start a blog, change your life, and think about the world in a new and exciting way.  But make sure that you are particupating and building relationships along the way.

[You can start your blog for free at WordPress.com]