Lessons in blogging

So it seems this writing lark is not as easy as it looks.  Sure, I can arrange words in a coherent order on a page, but writing to a theme and sticking with it is not so simple.

I started out my last post with what, in my head, were clear ideas on how I wanted to progress. Even while writing I found new material that agreed or disagreed with me and led me off track, sometimes mid paragraph. This led to me varying the focus of the piece without really seeing how this changed the whole substance of the article

So my first lesson; Write one post at a time. If an idea doesn't fit in here, don't force it, there will be a place for it later, or it may just turn out to be a bad idea.



Motivation also seems to be a factor.  The rants in my head bang around all day but when it comes to putting them on screen my brain runs down the back of the sofa and watches Star Trek re-runs.  If I am to keep any  momentum I will need to cure this. To any writer, it seems, this is not a revelation and many bloggers have described how they have to treat unpaid blogging like work and actually assign time for the workload.

Thus lesson two; Turn off anything that may distract me and assign some dedicated time of an evening to writing.   

This leads nicely into the question of "Is it worth it?". With this I am asking myself why I am trying to write what I am hoping to achieve and most importantly whether writing fulfils me an any way.  Right now I have no answers except that as an attempt to understand my own thoughts and improve my own communication skills I am finding it very interesting.

Lesson three; Enjoy it and keep working at it as long as it feels right.

I guess that no post on the challenges of writing would be complete without a few choices curses about deadlines though that greater minds than I have expounded on that matter of deadlines - usually while procrastinating over real work - so I'm not going to bother.

I am beginning to realise that in order for my writing to become more fluent I just need to do more of it. If you can bear the journey I look forward to your company while I try.

-M