In the comments to my first installment of Blogging for Beginners covering 3 questions to ask consider before you blog, Colleen Duggan made this observation:
There’s so much talk today (in general, not from your post specifically) about building a platform, audience and brand that I think it can scare real writers away from buying a domain name and setting up shop.
It’s ok to start a blog, one that is very small, to develop the writing craft, experiment with who you are as a writer, and figure out your voice. I think blogging helped me with this very thing and it’s been a great gift. Your point is a good one–knowing why we are blogging–but if someone out there wants to blog just because, I think it’s great.
I read Marian Roach Smith’s The Memoir Project over the weekend and she suggests one of the best reasons to write down our stories is so our families can have them. If that’s not a reason to continue to blog (even if we aren’t “big”) I don’t know what is.
Colleen makes a GREAT point, and she reminded me of why I started blogging and why I continue to blog: I just plain like it. It’s my space, it’s my voice, it’s my chance to do what I do.
Blogging can be a business and, honestly, I’ve resisted that. For me, as for most of us in the Catholic Writers Guild, I think, blogging is writing.
My goal with this series and with my writing here on the Guild blog is, first and foremost, to encourage other writers and share what I’ve learned and observed. A lot of this–as with so much else in the publishing world–is hit or miss. A lot of it is opinion.
At the end of the day, as we look at ourselves as Catholic writers, it is our vocational call that should motivate us. I’m a wife and mother before and while I’m a writer.
What do you think?
Go ahead, let’s talk about it. Because this is a conversational piece, FOR SURE. 🙂
Sarah Reinhard
When Sarah Reinhard's not writing online at SnoringScholar.com, she can be found on Twitter, Goodreads, Pinterest, Facebook, or Google +. She's the author of a number of books, including her latest title, Catholic Family Fun: A Guide for the Adventurous, Overwhelmed, Creative, or Clueless.
You are not alone! You are a member of a Body, and its Head has a wonderful way of coordinating all of His writers, mentors, publicists, editors, illustrators, and techies in a symphony of collaboration. You need to appropriate the wealth that is available to you.
I’ve only been blogging seriously for a few months….although I’ve started and stopped blogs before…starting back as early at 2008. But, this is the first time I’ve really been consistent about posting frequently and keeping up with it. I think the main difference is that this time…I’m just doing it for fun. I’m not trying to make money or build a big audience. Plus, this time, my blog is just a free-for-all, and I write about whatever the heck I want to. My other blogs were more focused..and I got bored with them…always trying to write on the same topic.
This time, I’m blogging just because I enjoy writing and having my thoughts spill out on paper and trying to find just the right turn of a phrase. It’s enjoyable and a good creative outfit…and I can do it while nursing a baby. 🙂
Amelia, welcome back! And I think fun blogging is the best kind…at least the best kind to keep going!
I literally just started a blog last week (thanks to the encouragement of a recent CWG blog post!). I did it mostly because I thought it’d be an interesting new experience, and because I wanted another writing outlet besides the novel I’m slowly working on. Also I really enjoy reading and talking about classic literature, and I thought it would be great if I could share those thoughts with others. I’m still totally new to the blogging world–I’ve never done anything quite like it before–but I’m enjoying it already!
Welcome, Mary! 🙂
Thanks! 🙂
Blogging for me is related to all the journaling I’ve done all these years. As a journalist, that’s where I have recorded my experiences, asked for insight and developed my ideas for the various columns I’ve written since before the Internet. From those journals full of bits and pieces of my life story come my blog posts. I’ve blogged for less than a year and find it so different from print media because I don’t know who my audience is, exactly, and must trust the Lord to get my posts to the ones who can benefit from the blessings he gives me.
Though I’ve heard blogging is a lot like journalism, Nancy, you make some great points and you also highlight one of the big challenges of blogging.
I’m glad you keep at it! 🙂
someone who understands..nice
Actually I can hardly believe that I feel free enough today to stand up and boldly yell,
” I love writing and I want to help others start writing by encouraging them to blog.”
It took me years to finally decide to start writing again. I had taken a 30 year sabbatical since leaving university to raise 9 children and I just couldn’t seem to start. Perhaps I could have started seven years ago when everyone was in school full-time but realistically there was simply too much physical work involved in running a household for eleven people and helping with the farm animals and our large vegetable garden.
Whenever I closeted myself in a room to sit down and write, I froze. I considered writing to be a solitary craft but looking at a blank screen or talking into thin air was a sterile exercise in futility for me. I could not translate the same creative energy that I experienced telling a story verbally to the keyboard. My intuitive, imaginative side stayed buried and my logical intellect wrote boring drivel.
Somehow I heard about blogs, blogging sites and blogging directories and I snapped to attention. Suddenly, I was thinking up a username, a title for a blog, looking at templates and design and layout. All these activities loosened up my creativity while I sat typing
It was like an invisible barrier slowly melted, allowing my imagination to bubble up in a stream of written words that felt just as exhilarating as my oral tradition. I was excited to start sharing written stories with other people, people who would read them, respond, comment and give me feed back on what I had written. Within weeks, I was no longer an island but part of a community of other writers who had the very same insecurities and problems as I did.
You know, Melanie, maybe that’s what it is about blogging that sort of got me “slipped into” writing…the loosening up of my creativity and the tapping into more than one level of creativity: it’s not “just” writing, there’s the design element too. Hmmm.
I’m glad you’re here. 🙂 And farm animals? Scuse me while I head on over to your blog to check THAT out! 🙂
My vocation is where I get all my material. I can’t make this stuff up! 🙂
You do encourage other writers, Sarah. Keep up the good work.
Yeah, Colleen, I’m SO with you on that! 🙂 And thanks! 🙂
Recognizing and upholding our primarily vocation, whatever that may be is a topic I plan on tackling in my next installment of my Confessions of The Original Online Junkie. I’m in a weird spot, in that I don’t *love* to write, am not good at it, but I feel compelled to share what I think God is asking me to share. It’s not quite an act of humility for me but I am really not comfortable with my lack of writing skills.
The focus of my talk and post is that when we put our primary vocation first, God hones our crafts through those domestic chores, for example. I find that I can hear His plan for my blog and life when I give my children time with their mother, or when I make a cooked from scratch meal, or handle the usual daily chores cheerfully. My vocation feeds my apostolates and vice versa. I’d be happy to link up when it goes live. 🙂
“At the end of the day, as we look at ourselves as Catholic writers, it is our vocational call that should motivate us. I’m a wife and mother before and while I’m a writer.”
This right here says it for me. It is the ONE point I find most difficult for other people, whose vocations do not include writing, or do not include children or a husband, that my vocation is all three things! It isn’t that I’m a wife who has kids, I am a wife and mother. It isn’t that I am a mom who writes, I am a writer, wife and mom. Take any one aspect away and it is a different vocation.
If I am not writing, the creativity festers and begins to create useless drama. I need my writing time to be my best at other times.
I’m beginning to wonder if my husband quite understands that yet. We’ve been trying to find a division of kid care that gives me the time I need to write. With a three year old who only behaves well if she has your attention, it can be challenging!
Ann, yes, it is an three-fer deal for me too, but I find the weight of each of them varies with the season of life (and sometimes the season of the year). There’s a constant change that goes on (which my Type A OCD self doesn’t necessarily LIKE very much) and a balancing act that I have to always be aware of.