For years, I’ve been an advocate of blogging as a way to develop a body of work. Once you’ve got a blog up and running, part of its hidden benefit is having something to leverage. Angela Jiang on micro levers:
Many view the creation of content as an audience building tactic rather than a way of creating a micro lever. If you're aiming to become a consistent online creator, then by all means continue. But not everyone has that goal. Many just want to be able to create an edge for themselves and advance their intermediate goals - whether that's getting a dream job, breaking into an industry, or advancing in their field. If your goal is more like this, then it's more valuable to approach content creation as a way to create a micro lever. Scope your creation efforts to building a solid piece of work that can serve as proof of work. Share where you can but treat the audience building as a potential upside not an objective.
But creating mindless blog posts that are set up for views and search engines lessens your authentic voice and what it can accomplish. Cory Doctorow writes in The Memex Method, his reminiscence of 20 years of blogging:
There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.”
Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.
You need to create something that actually resonates with people, and a voice that is able to attract people to become your audience. Developing that voice doesn’t happen overnight, and it’s useful to be able to share the steps that get you there. Cory Doctorow:
When it comes to a (my) blogging method for writing longer, more synthetic work, the traditional relationship between research and writing is reversed. Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.
Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.
I agree with this way of thinking. Larger ideas emerge from a series of blog posts over time rather than announcing themselves with clarity the way one finds in a book. One of the ways to spot genuine blogs and newsletters is their desire to think and process ideas rather than just market stuff. The most interesting bloggers don’t always have things figured out, but they leave a trail of breadcrumbs that lead to more fully realized ideas later on.
Over the next while I’ll be working through some of these ideas and perhaps going back to a more spontaneous, fragmented process of blogging rather than always trying to have ideas worked out to fruition. Part of the fun of blogging is throwing ideas out there and seeing where they go.
(Image courtesy of Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash)