Blogging

In the next month I will be less busy than usual, and to not get too lazy I decided to commit to publishing one article a day. The goals I’m working toward are becoming more persistent in finishing the tasks I choose to do, and improving my writing abilities, especially in English. So a post every day seems like a good excuse to practice and move towards those goals.

This challenge will definitely push me out of my comfort zone. I’m not that skilled at writing blog posts, and to be honest not even at writing in general. Also most of the writing I’ve done previously was in my native language, Italian, so a bit of English workout is waiting for me. Two other challenges are: finding interesting topics to write about every day, and my writing speed. To help me overcome the first one, being less busy will give me more time to think freely and use my imagination, plus I have a few saved article drafts that I can use. My writing speed is probably the hardest one. It directly relates to the quality of my writing, and for a beginner it’s worth spending time polishing each draft rather than writing a lot. But I’m 32, and it’s time to find a faster way to improve, even if it means producing less refined content. In any case, the speed is probably where I hope to see some progress at the end of this experiment.

How will I know if this challenge has been successful? I don’t really have any metrics available other than basic web analytics. I would say that what matters the most is to commit every day and try not to go a single day without publishing. Then in a month I will be able to check the progress in the archive page and count the days I missed.

Some blogging principles

Blogging is one of the best tools that writers have. Everything can go on a blog, from cooking and cat photos, to long essays about the meaning of nearly everything. While it’s comforting that nothing is off-topic, it also means I need to decide what belongs on my blog. What are my principles for writing here?

I put down a few guidelines that I want to follow:

• One core idea per post. This comes naturally since a post should be an idea or an opinion condensed in a small space. The hard part is sticking to the topic and not letting the discourse go in multiple directions. Having a short amount of time will also force me to keep my ideas small — I always tend to think too big.
• Be concise. This is more about the form than the content. People don’t have an infinite amount of time to spend reading a random post, so the more I can condense information while keeping a good rhythm, the better the result will be. A good technique is to quickly write a raw draft first, then do the polishing later, cutting the unnecessary and rewriting the parts that are unclear.
• Keep it mine. I believe that good writing is personal, bad writing is anonymous. There are no rules for good or bad writing on a blog, but the posts I appreciate more are the ones that give a perspective, an opinion, or more in general that tell a personal story. A personal blog should be a diary, a conversation with the reader. So in my posts I will put my real thoughts, not trying to be fair or even right.
• Write manually. This should be obvious, otherwise why put so much effort in it? Recent algorithms can put together a decent post and with a few tweaks I bet it can resemble something written by a human. We live in a strange time where machine-generated content is sprawling all over the web, with or without humans behind it. I see generated articles, generated comments on social media, generated images and code all over the place. I don’t like it and I don’t want to collaborate. Writing is like a muscle, it needs proper constant training to grow. Keeping a blog is a gym for the modern writer, so write it manually or don’t write it at all. Writing is one of the most effective ways to organise your thoughts in a cohesive way. Paraphrasing Paul Graham, if you delegate this process entirely to the machine, not only you never learn how to write, but you lose one of the best ways that helps you think better.
• Be positive. To write angry rants, complain that everything is shit, that we deserve better without taking any action, it’s easy. It really is. But it has consequences. Look at how overexposure to media generates stress and anxiety in people and fuel anger and depression. The hard task here is to write interesting content using a positive attitude. I don’t like the forced optimism culture, too often delivered with large smiles, because I don’t feel it’s authentic, I don’t feel it really comes from a genuine place, but from the stakes involved or ideology. Instead, I like genuine positive thinking, which comes from putting content into the world with the intention of making it a little more interesting, useful, or thoughtful than before.

Enough rambling about blogging for today. A new article is already boiling. Wish me luck.