How to Get Over Yourself and Write More Blog PostsPosted by Heidi Strom Moon under Content Strategy & Web Writing , Web Strategy
Amber Naslund of Altitude Branding wrote a great blog post last week on how to, well, write great blog posts. Of her 9 ways to breathe more life into your blog, the one that struck me most was #8: “Be Okay With Incomplete Thoughts.”
Here’s what Amber said: “So many people think they’ve got to write the complete guide to whatever to have a blog post. Instructions and how-tos have their place, but so does theory, insight, exploration, questioning. That’s part of what distinguishes a blog from a seminar, to me. It’s teaching and learning all wrapped into one.”
It shouldn’t seem that revelatory, but it was. Now maybe you’re not as much of a perfectionist as I am (or recovering journalist), but my internal editor usually insists that my writing doesn’t really count as writing—especially not for the blog—unless it’s a complete thing with a beginning, middle and end.
Don’t get me wrong, perfection has its place. So do multi-part blog post series. But Amber’s onto something here. Not all blog posts have to be “Here’s the Answer” instructional. They can be “Here’s An Answer” or “I’m Trying to Figure out the Answer” or even “What’s the Answer?”
As long as what you’re writing falls within your blog’s larger mission and scope (you do have a reason why you’re blogging, right?), an individual post’s format can be any degree of baked, from nicely browned to just-mixed dough.
So don’t worry whether your thought is complete or incomplete. Buy your lizard-brained internal editor a latte and let her relax for a while. And just write. Ship it, publish it, and write some more.
- How do you feel about writing “incomplete thoughts”?
- How do you defeat the lizard brain or the internal editor?
[Photo credit: Hythe Eye, Flickr Creative Commons]
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