Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Lost Threads...

It is easy as a blogger to sit and stare at that blank screen looking for inspiration.  To write that one witty blog post that will get everyone talking, and retweeting like that age old Breck ad (please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers the "and then they'll tell their friends, and they'll tell their friends... " ad..).

That is the dream of the golden egg at this stage in a bloggers life (later, we'll have hopes to be like Jenny and go on book tour, but that is getting WA-A-AY ahead of ourselves, and frankly expects that we decide not to be anonymous after all, and that's a whole other set of questions.

Anyway, it is easy for us to have writer's block.  Or to start several posts and have them get nowhere, as I described in this post about dykes, insanity, relationships, romantic

Fellow bloggers, please take a moment to tell me below what you do to get out of your slump.

I've been fortunately, lately, riding high on a wave of Twitter (who knew it would happen?) that I have been fairly prolific recently, but I have been listening to a friend the past few evenings struggling with writer's block.  And wishing - as I always do no matter what problem a friend may have - that I had the magic pill to fix the problem.  Maybe because of all the problems she's going through, that's the one I'm most likely to have a real solution for - and yet, I haven't provided her with one yet.  (Here it is!)

As bloggers, when we write, we have the great landscape of what we want to talk about out in front of us.  We recognize that we can't tell you everything at once.  Leo Tolstoy tried that once in this short little novel War and Peace but I'm not sure how many people he actually managed to tell his whole story to.  (I've read the first 150 or so pages, and it is interesting, and I'd be curious to pick it up again, as it was 25 years ago that I first tried to read it.  My father when he separated from my mother took that book with him - supposedly in his head it was going to be what he accomplished but the last time I had asked him about it, he never finished it.  I'm not sure if he cracked it even). 

Bloggers, surprisingly, don't want reading their blogs to be as challenging as Mt. Everest, unless, of course, that brings hundreds of thousands of readers.  But the reality is we want you to stay. 

So even though we have this vast landscape of ideas of things we want to tell you about, we know we can't dump it all into one blog entry. Otherwise we'd be book writers.  But we see it as we write about just a small portion of what we want to tell you about.  We know it's there, so we hint at it "Ah, but that's a blog post for another day."  "Oh, that's a story of itself"  "Continue reading, I'll address that in a later post." 

In our heads, it's all mapped out beautifully and ready to go.  On our computers? Not so much. 

So I suggest to those of you bloggers who are feeling empty of ideas of what to write about, that you go back and re-read your own blog to see what you hinted was to come, but hasn't yet come, and perhaps find a topic there that strikes your fancy, your imagination, and most importantly, your fingers. 

Good luck.  I can't wait to read more of your stories...

P.S. Bloggers? Don't be afraid to use my blog as a place to tell me about yours.  Until I start getting over 100 comments a day to this post (a girl can dream) I promise to go look at every blog that is mentioned in the comments below.  Go for it.  And keep writing.

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1 comment:

  1. You hit the nail on the head, as usual! Part of my writer's block is fear, pure and simple. But fear of what? Fear of hurting someone else's feelings. Fear of being made fun of. Fear of not saying the right things.

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