How do you write what people actually want to read?
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Many many years ago, during my first foray into the world of blogging, an acquaintance from high school messaged me on Facebook. I don’t remember the exact details about the conversation we had, but she was basically wanting to build a following doing freelance work for…something or other after just giving birth to her first child, to supplement her and her boyfriend’s income. She knew I had a blog, and wanted to know where to start.
It’s a question that I often ask myself. Where do I start with this? Anyone who knows me knows that I like to write fiction stories, also. That’s another thing people have asked in the past – how do you start something like that?
It’s not an easy thing. Sometimes you open a word document or the post page and just…sit, staring at the screen. Other times, the words come easily and your fingers just fly across the keys. Sometimes, you’ll have moments of inspiration and then it just…fizzles out. I used to say that the creative juices were flowing within me – and when I got stuck, I’d joke that I ran out of juice and it needed to be replenished.
Without a doubt, I find the start of anything the most troublesome. The first paragraph is always what grabs a reader’s attention. Think of your favourite book – if the first paragraph was anything other than what it was, would you have kept going? The first chapter? It’s what leads into the rest, and when you nail that, the rest often just seems to flow.
Of course, that’s not always the case. That’s just my experience with writing.
But even before that, even before writing the intro, consideration has to be given as to what you’re going to write, and I think that’s where many people get stuck. I could get all technical and say things like I write my posts for the intended audience. Heck, I’ve done that before – I’ve designed this blog and given it many different names to try to target a specific audience and tailor all posts – regardless of the topic – to that niche. However, it always seemed to fail – it always fizzled out. The creative juices dried up.
Why?
Because I wasn’t writing for me.
Blogging is a personal thing. What you want to get out of it dictates what you write – if you want to target the medical community, you write about medicine.If you want to target your blog to tech professionals you write about tech topics. But Regardless, you write it for you. You write for what you want to see. You write for your own vision. Not the vision of what you think people will want to see.
I often blog just for the sake of blogging. For the sake of writing. But there are some things that I’ll explore further – I explain about this in my post Changes Are A-Coming – but I still base my posts on what I would like to see. Even blogs connected to companies and workplaces blog about things that they want to see, to portray what they see themselves as.
That’s what writing is, to me, and that’s what I told that friend, many years ago. Start by blogging what you like, what you want to see. Writing is a process of putting words to paper that represents the self. I don’t write for the audience, or the follows and likes. I write for me.
The audience, follows and likes is just a very happy by-product – and I’m grateful for every single one I get.
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