Weblogging as if it really mattered: How to write with integrity and passion

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you know what stinks? The world is acrawl with canned-spam, cookie-cutter, rinse-and-repeat weblogging advice — and people follow it slavishly instead of keeping their own counsel, living their own ideal, following their own star.

That is: If I read another weblog post on how to write weblog posts, I think I’ll scream. To absolve myself of charges of hypocrisy, in advance, this not a post about how to write posts, it’s a post about how to write.

Do you want to know how to write? Here’s the tiniest taste of a first lesson: Start in the middle.

Not: “This is my report on…”

Not: “Webster’s defines…”

Not: “How can I begin to tell you…?”

Start in the middle, the way you’d start a phone conversation with someone you knew would be calling.

Like this: “Do you know what stinks?”

Oh, yes, comforting rules abound, but they are the very same rules you rebel against in every other aspect of your life. You say, “I don’t want the cookie-cutter taupe-on-taupe one-size-fits-all same-damn-thing.” And yet you scour the web, looking for sage advice about how to produce weblog posts that will not challenge, will not inspire, will not aspire, will not invoke, convoke or provoke, will not do anything except testify to your perfect ability to master perfectly bad advice.

If you are not interested in what you’re writing, how could you expect anyone else to be interested?

If you are convinced (by your own conviction or by having imbibed from too many fonts of false wisdom) that you cannot hope to connect with other people except by resort to EZ-reading tricks — dumbing the entire universe down to the drooling imbecility of the dumbest conceivable specimen — why would you expect anyone to respect and reflect upon your brilliance?

Good grief!

If you are writing to manipulate, follow the rules. They work.

If you’re writing to sell a product, follow the rules. They work.

If you’re writing to hide, writing to dissemble, writing to occlude, writing to obfuscate, writing to pull the wool over as many eyes as you can capture — follow the rules. They work.

But: If you are writing to communicate — make a connection and build on it. Start in the middle, for a start. It enraptures living minds. But write as yourself — as your self — not some brainless robot assiduously following an algorithm.

Seth Godin identified three types of weblogs: Boss blogs, cat blogs and viral blogs. Unheralded, the viral blogs have split in two: Those driven by an outsized passion, and those ravenous to manipulate to an objective — often an unnamed objective.

The rules of rinse-and-repeat weblog writing are written for the latter type — and I could not possibly care less about them. Spam is spam, no matter how it’s canned.

If you’re interested in writing for passion — for action, for love, for joy, for laughter, for change, for wisdom, for art — then write. Cicero said, “Usus est magister optimus.” Practice is the best teacher. If you can move yourself, you can move the world. It won’t be EZ-reading, but nothing that matters comes easy. And nothing that comes easy matters very much at all, in the end.
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