Everything is Grist for the Writing Mill

When you first start a blog, you are full of ideas. Coming up with the next one is not difficult at all. For at least the first three days!

Somewhere between 3 and 15 days, you start to wonder how you are going to keep it up. You usually struggle for a while – learning how to brainstorm for ideas of things to write. Then a slow change takes place. You begin to think about blogging throughout the day – topics occur to you at the most unusual times. You find yourself thinking, “I should blog about this!”.

When you become a true blogger, you realize that everything is grist for the mill. You don’t have to produce something profound every time. It just needs to be something of interest, worth writing down. I can blog about watching the tree bud from the livingroom window near my office chair. I can blog about how in between business projects I am thinking about the garden we’ll grow this summer. I can blog about how nice it is to be able to weave the necessities of life into my daily employment. I don’t have to produce Pulitzer Prize quality editorials every time!

I used to blog once a week. When I did that, I could mull over what I said, really think out a conclusion, consider what the most important thing was. It was a column, more than a blog. Useful, and appreciated, but different.

Since stepping up the pace, I’ve noticed a change in how I write. I’m less concerned with the huge concept, more able to explore the trivial. Sometimes there is value in trivia – not that it should ALL be trivia, but, like the old parenting argument of “quality versus quantity”, sometimes we actually define the profound better in detailing the small things than we do in trying to consolidate it into a large conclusion.

The essence of blogging changes when we blog more frequently. I don’t think it changes in a bad way, because I think those profound editorials still find their way in. But we find the opportunity to explore more things in a more detailed way, as well as just dash of peripheral or surface observations in a way that we miss when we are focusing on one thing a week.

Give yourself the freedom to explore things in a new way. When that happens, you find a voice you did not know you had.

This article is a companion to an article on Keeping Track of Blogging Ideas on our MicroWeb Blog Community blog.