Don’t Confuse Inanity With Originality
Yesterday I wrote about how to write original articles for your blog. I hit publish, and then almost as soon as I’d switched off my computer I thought of a caveat that I’d forgotten to include which I really should have. That’s what I’ll be talking about in today’s post.
A Trap That A Lot Of Writers Fall Into
I can practically guarantee that everyone reading this article has come across this: Picture yourself in a bookstore. You see a cover that catches your eye, and you pick it up. You read the blurb. Maybe flick through a few pages. Importantly, you read the “About The Author” section on the dust jacket.
It says, “Author Von Author is a full-time writer. She lives in Somewhere, Colorado with her husband and three cats; Cecil, Ginger and Roxy. She also plays the guitar and loves pickles.”
Those details have nothing to do with anything you’d be remotely interested in, but on a book cover they can be forgiven. After all, it’s just a little passage about the author and it doesn’t harm anyone.
The problem comes in the internet age, where you’ll have writers who write this sort of thing endlessly on their blogs, personal sites and other venues where they should be writing about their work.
Yesterday, I talked about merging separate interests and bringing together different markets. I stand by that as a great idea because of the originality it brings, but there is a danger that you’ll fall into irrelevant articles and inane contributions.
Ultimately, you have to balance your outside interests with doing what you’re actually trying to do.
For instance, I’ve got complete creative control over this website. I write every day, and I could write whatever I want. Sometimes, I don’t feel like writing about writing. I could write about my other interests. I don’t though, because the point of this site is to talk about writing.
Do I mix in other subjects? Yes. Yesterday I talked about exercise. So, where am I going with this topic?
How To Avoid Inane, Irrelevant Posting On A Website
When you’re writing non-fiction, you’re writing with one thing in mind: Getting to the point. More specifically, you are writing towards giving a person all the information they need about a topic and then wrapping up all that information into some kind of useful conclusion which will cause your reader to act on the information you’ve given them.
You can use all manner of embedded analogies and other topics to draw inspiration from, but the key to that being effective lies in whether or not you’re always moving towards the conclusion you set yourself. This is quite straightforward in terms of a single article, but you also need to do it in terms of the whole scope of your website/book/writing project.
To use a couple of examples:
Yesterday, I wrote about my attitudes on health and fitness. I created my own views as a profile so that I could describe how to create a website for a person that wasn’t a typical customer within a niche. In that one article, it worked: I explained a different interest I had, tied it in with the topic (writing) and used it as a useful analogy. If I did the same thing with every article and went off on a tangent about a separate interest of mine, it wouldn’t work. If I’d have written an article just about my fitness schedule, then that wouldn’t have worked either; people who read this site would think, “What’s that got to do with anything?”
A second example is something that doesn’t work: I went on a website the other day. It was a copywriting website (supposedly a copywriting agency but it was clearly one person) who had a list of technical articles on their blog page. That’s great, but mixed in liberally were a blog post that was a recipe for a smoothie (What?) a post about the writer’s kids (what?) and an “I really don’t have time to post” post. None of those things add to the site. They detract from it. I could understand why a person would post about their kids, (I love my kids, family image) but it doesn’t work unless you relate it to your business. I can understand why you’d write a blog post explaining your lack of work, but it’s still a bad idea, and the smoothie recipe… I still don’t know what the hell that was about, and I’ve been thinking about it for four days.
Those mistakes are just examples of something which writers do all too often: They think and act as though their “being” is what people read for, and not their ability to turn words into specific things. Don’t be an inane writer talking about your cats.
How To Avoid Being Irrelevant and Inane But Still Be Original
So, yesterday I told you to think about the unique aspects of yourself. I told you to add those into the conversation so as to distinguish you from the crowd of writers who were all writing cookie-cutter nonsense.
Today, I’m telling you that nobody cares about your hobbies or interests and you should cut them out if they’re not relevant. So how am I reconciling those two things?
Here’s a two-step plan:
- Make sure everything you write is written to a central theme. This is what your site is about. Do not stray from the theme or central ideology at any point.
- Once you have achieved that, then you add in the things we talked about yesterday.
Those things from yesterday which add originality to your work are where you add your interests and opinions, and they can be summarised thusly:
- Voice: You speak differently to everyone else. That doesn’t mean you relate everything to your cats or you have to talk like a sociology professor: It’s just a natural cadence to your writing which you mustn’t suppress.
- Action: You’re different to everyone else because you do different things. Namely, you’ll learn something through experience by leaning on a whole range of previous learned experiences, the combination of which nobody else will have.
- Disparate knowledge: Again, nobody will have the same range of knowledge as you. This doesn’t mean that you should talk about completely unrelated stuff, it simply means that you draw different analogies and metaphors, as well as incorporate different storytelling styles and anecdotes in your writing.
Final Thoughts
Between the past two days’ worth of articles, you’ve got a solid framework for how and what to write in order to have a unique blog. Hopefully, this article has clarified (though I’m not sure) exactly what I meant by yesterday’s post, and more specifically it’s explained how not to write a blog.
Like I said, this has developed out of what I felt was an oversight on my part. Essentially though; talk about a range of things and express yourself fully, but do it in the context of your goals and theme.