I have TRIED to write a blog post so many times, but it feels like I’m just rambling and everything is disorganized and awful and the only thing i can do consistently is like the most basic recap of what happened that day and am i doing something wrong and how do i fix this
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Welcome to writing. /lies on the floor in solidarity
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There is no right or wrong way to blog.
Write about the cheese sandwich you ate.
Write about that funny thing you saw walking today.
Write about your favorite book, movie, TV show, album.
Write about whatever your heart desires.
There is no right or wrong way to blog.
Write in complete sentences. Or not.
Use punctuation. Or not
Plot out your writing with a fancy outline. Or just hit your keys with reckless abandon.
Review what you’ve written afterward. Or publish and move onto the next.
Whatever you choose to do with your blog, you’re doing it right.
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First of all, write short like you’re writing something down in your personal diary that no one else is ever gonna read.
Second, don’t try to be perfect you literally can’t be perfect and maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes the imperfect stuff is what makes your writing feel real and that’s what people connect with.
Third, if you’re stuck or don’t know what to write just listen to someone talk about the topic maybe watch a video, a podcast, whatever, borrow their wording, quote them, reference them like “I was listening to this person talk about XYZ and they said something like…” that’s how info spreads. It’s literally how we learn about stuff like 9/11, Pearl Harbor, or even the Ukraine-Russia war. Not by reading thick history books but through people talking.
So yeah, don’t overthink it. Write how you speak. That’s more than enough.
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Consider your writing a first draft. You can always edit it until it sounds better to you. Rewrite to your heart’s content. The first draft is you telling yourself the post, you can change it afterwards if you want.
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Literally just practice brah.
Also, there is that hank green advice about publishing when you think you are 80% done. Do that.
The idea being, that last 20% will always take as long (or longer) than the first 80%. And will never feel good. By publishing at 80℅ you can get more practice in, and eventually your standards at 80℅ will eclipse your old standards at 100%
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The only way to get better at writing is to practice. A lot.
This means you’re going to produce a lot of crap. Mercedes Lackey once told me she estimates you need to produce one million words of writing before you’re even close to ready to write well; based on my own career, I’d say a million words is about right.
There are no shortcuts. You have to write the million words. You will be unhappy with most of them. This is what it means to write. As Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “You have to like it better than being loved.”
The good news is that as long as you’re writing something, you’re a writer and no one can tell you otherwise. So summarize your day if that’s all you have right now! It still counts!
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alas, in order to get good at something you have to be bad at it first! something has to be finished in order to be edited or improved, so unfortunately you have to write crummy stuff.
if it helps, try to think of writing the way you might think about more visual forms of art! there is always a period of time in the creation process when a shirt is just a bunch of fabric splayed out on a table, a statue is an ugly chunk of rock with bits taken out of it, a painting is just a bunch of blobs. it’s a natural part of the process! & writing is the same way.
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You don’t fix this because there’s nothing to fix. There’s nothing wrong with you or what you’re doing.
When I write, I metaphorically drop my pants and defecate into my text editor. I know that everything I write is going to be shit at first, and I’ve learned to be OK with that. I can always polish the turd after I’ve gotten it out, but I won’t get anywhere by holding it in.
If you’re rambling, it might be because you need to ramble. If it comes out disorganized and “awful”, it might just be because you’re not used to writing. The only way to get better at it is to do it poorly at first.
Be patient with yourself. Try not to compare yourself to people who are farther along in their respective journeys than you are in yours. Take your time. You’ll get there.
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That is the reason why I never had a blog.
You can’t be perfect at the start look around everything you see that seems perfect now, it wasn’t always like that maybe it looked rough or uncertain in the beginning, but with time, effort and just showing up again and again it got better, that’s how things grow, that’s how you grow.
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Also, one technique I used to teach my uni writing classes:
If you feel like you can express yourself better in speech than in writing, record yourself talking about something and then transcribe it (or use speech to text).
Then, read it back and see if you like it better than writing directly. Edit out any "um"s or anything else you don’t want there.
Some people just organize their thoughts better by talking. It’s worth finding out if you are one of them.
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A trick from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: focus on the little things. Write about something small. Minute details. Cracks in a wall. The ivy clinging to them. Uneven mortar between rows of bricks. It’s a lot less daunting than trying to take in a monumental building at a glance, yet captures precious impressions about it.
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What you’ve described sounds exactly like blogging, to me.
That being said, if there are times where there are topics you’d like to be more concise about it, the only way to get better at it, is to do it more.
Using a technique like DrMollytov mentioned is a good approach to see if you organize your thoughts differently in different modes of communication.
Also if you’re writing whatever and you touch on a subject you think you’d like to focus on more, just, cut that out, put it in a word document and write on it later. You can talk about any topic at any time. you can talk about the same topic, multiple times!
Also, if you’re trying to hold yourself to a standard of other blogs you’ve seen/read, remember that it’s very likely those people have been doing that for years, often 10 or more. I’ve been journaling since I was 8, and started using livejournal when I was 17. I’ve had a LOT of practice with learning how to communicate with an unknown audience as well as putting thoughts and points into concise and succinct verbiage. But that took YEARS, and even then sometimes I just wanna babble and that’s just fine! It’s a blog, it’s my personal space, I do what I want.
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sso how long would it take to get to that level of professionalism
I mean, how are we defining “professionalism”?
To the point where other people don’t think you’re an amateur: It took me ten years of writing consistently 500-1000 words a day. I can’t speak for anyone else.
To the point where I don’t think I’m a total hack: I’ll let you know when that happens. I write for a living and have published three books, and I still think I’m at least 40% hack.
If it helps, the daily writing you do doesn’t need to be public. A lot of mine was in journals (still is). Nobody gets to see those.
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If you meant ‘proficiency’, well, it takes as long as it takes. I’ve been doing it for thirty years, but I still can’t make a living at it so I won’t talk about ‘professionalism’.
Reading more, and reading all but indiscriminately, can help speed the process along. But you’ve got to write, and you’ve got to live with the likelihood that your writing will suck. It’ll just suck less as you get better at editing/revision.
After all, George Lucas can’t write for shit. The way his wife at the time edited the living hell out of his raw material is the reason Star Wars became a thing.
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I am by NO means a professional, I never claim to be a professional, I don’t want to be a professional. The only thing I want, that I ever wanted, was to be understood. I think it took me about 8 years to hit a stride that really felt like I was able to convey personal esoteric concepts and have it be understood by the majority of readers.
I’m curious, what is it that you’re so worried about with blogging? You know it’s just a personal public diary, right? Once again as I said, if you’re comparing yourself to others that have blogging for over a decade and trying to achieve what they have, you’re going about it the wrong way.
First and foremost, you blog for yourself. Your primary audience is yourself, it’s to help you give words to your perspective that are frozen in time that you can visit at any time to give yourself perspective and growth. It also serves as an important exercise in memory retention as writing down things that are mundane helps you remember it. It is something I’ve been especially grateful for as I’ve gotten older, to have all these messy journal and blog entries to revisit and appreciate even the mundane aspects of my life.
You’re not a journalist and that’s fine! If you keep chasing some invisible standard of ‘professional’ you’re going to tie yourself up in knots and won’t have any fun with it. It’s a practice you should enjoy, it’s not work.
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I feel like really bad writing and like if i was better I wouldn’t be and I can’t stop worrying and stsuff
Can you say more about what you’re aiming for? I see a lot of the advice in this thread is to just stop caring, but what advice is the most applicable depends on what your goals are.
If you’re looking for writing advice, then the first step is to figure out what exactly you find unsatisfying about the writing you’ve done so far. If what you have is a vague nebulous sense that someone out there won’t like it, that could be more of a general self-confidence issue, whereas if you can pinpoint something about the gap between what you’re looking to do and how it’s turning out for you, then that might be an occasion to learn more about specific writing and composition techniques. I may be able to suggest some of the latter if that’s what you’re interested in.
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