Recently a friend asked me, as friends do from time to
time, how to go about writing a blog. The best thing I can tell them is that blogging
is like sending messages in a bottle. Don’t send one and stop, waiting for the
ship to find you. Don’t send one, hoping you’ll get rich and famous overnight. Keep
the messages coming.
I only started writing a blog because the instructor
of a writing class I went to told us that all writers must participate in
social media. She refused to consider the excuses -- that writers are the most
introverted and socially awkward of so-called professionals, a claim backed by
extensive research (which I’m making up as I go along) indicating that as a
group, we rank lower in interpersonal skills than sociopathic basement-dwelling
computer hackers. I started with Facebook; went on to build my own website, now
mercifully demolished, from a box. Then I tried blogging.
There are lots of websites that support blogging, but
why not start with a free site like this one at Blogger or Wordpress, which may be
more popular with writers, at least writers I follow.
It was so easy, no worse than setting up a Facebook
account. Of course, I was doing everything completely and totally wrong. I
learned this the first time I typed in my own URL and Google told me it couldn’t
find it.
Fortunately, a few months later the DFW Writers’Conference included a class
on blogging, taught by Kristen Lamb, a tiny blonde, martial-arts chopping dynamo out to prove to writers that we can
overcome the weaknesses of our blogs. Which she knew because she had been there.
In general, it’s safest to let Kristen speak for
herself through her blog, which she will, even if I could manage to slap zip ties on
her wrists and gag her with duct tape, because that’s the kind of woman she
is. But I’ll mention her first rule: forget the natural writerly tendency to
try to fade into the background, hiding behind some blog title that’s supposed
to sound cute but actually is just stupid, like mine, which has required years
of therapy and massive doses of mind-altering drugs to overcome. Kristen
admitted, like a motivational speaker at a 12-step program, that she had done
this herself, but had overcome by relentlessly rebranding her blog as (gasp!)
Kristen Lamb’s Blog. Google it. It works.
Kristen’s second rule of blogging is to rip any thought
of ourselves as “aspiring writers” right out of our frontal cortexes. Ouch!
(But don’t you feel better now?) “Aspiring” is for sissies. We’re writers. So
we write, and we feed our blogs by writing. Often. Writing regularly and often
in itself puts little bread crumb trails on the Internet that lets search
engines like Google’s find us. In the meantime, we should link, link, link like
crazy to our blog’s URL. Google’s bloodhounds are out there sniffing.
Somewhere along the line I heard that the simple act
of writing regularly helps us write better. It’s true, although it helps if we
write intentionally and with no more than moderate amounts of the
above-mentioned mind-altering drugs.
We also need a theme for our posts, indeed, for our entire
blog, maybe for our entire lives. (Theme being something I learned even more
about from another amazing DFW Conference speaker this year, Disney Jr.
channel’s photo mom, Me Ra Koh.)
I can’t remember whether Kristen ordered us to include
images with our blog posts or whether I learned that on my own, but do it. Any
image, even the craziest, immediately draws more attention from web surfers.
Internet guru James Gaskin,
who I met at another writers’ group confessed that he got a cat just so he
could post cute cat pictures with his blog.
Like James, I take most of my own pictures or download
them free from sites such as Wikimedia .
There are sources of clip art pictures, some of which you have to pay for. Remember to play right with copyright rules or you may find FBI agents knocking
on your door. And they’re way less good looking in person than in the movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment