You’ve had most of a week now to get started on your blog posting schedule. If you’ve followed through on that, today’s writing exercise will take you five minutes. If you haven’t, today’s writing exercise is another kick in the pants to get you started.
I’ve said before that one of the biggest challenges of blogging is writing to a regular deadline. It wears you down. You want to know the answer? The trick? If you’ve read my updates on the Challenge, you already know. For that matter, if you just read the section headings for this article, you know. The answer is to take control. Take control of your blog posting schedule, instead of drifting helplessly into your deadlines, and your blog will blossom and grow again, both in quality of content and in your affection as well.
This year, I participated in the first annual Conscious Me Pre-Writing Challenge. Not only did I participate…I won it. This challenge is all about Writing it Early, which I talked about at the start of the challenge. That’s something you need to work on, whether you’re a blogger, a novelist, or anyone else who has to do serious writing from time to time. It always feels like a hassle, a necessary evil — or maybe you see it as a luxury you can’t afford — but it’s one of the best things you can do to make your work better (and, ultimately, to make it easier and less stressful).
I’ve mentioned it a couple times, and even devoted a whole page to a detailed description, but I’m participating in the Conscious Me Pre-Writing Challenge.
It’s all about Writing it Early, which I talked about a couple weeks ago, just as I was getting started. I thought it might be beneficial to you guys, my readers, to know a little bit more about the challenge, and about my experience with it.
Your assignment this week is to provide me detailed feedback and practice borrowing others’ inspiration, all at one go. I want you to pick an article on UnstressedSyllables.com and critique it on your blog. Write 300-900 words analyzing the presentation, the content, the readability, the skimmability, the applicability, even the statistical distribution of non-E vowels. Go back to my advice in “What Should You Write About?” and figure out what you should write about, when you’re describing my blog.
That’s the biggest challenge of any blogging project: keeping up with the blog’s posting schedule. Really, it’s just a regularly recurring version of what is the biggest challenge for every writer: writing to a deadline.
There are techniques for handling that last minute writing, skills you can learn to make it as good as possible, but in the end that’s all just damage control. You cannot write your best quality work unless you write it early.
I’ve talked about which conclusions work best for essays, for arguments, or for short stories. Today you’re going to work on a document type that combines them all.
Your assignment this week is to write an editorial. Write an opinion piece concerning something of interest to you.
Tell a story.
Work that weird alchemy I waxed poetic about yesterday, and turn the events of your life into a true tale. Think about something that happened yesterday, or this week, and make a story out of it. Don’t just tell us what happened, craft it.
You should keep a blog. And, yes, I mean you personally.
Today’s post is for everybody. Today’s post is about the benefits of blogging to casual writers just trying to get simple ideas across. Today’s post could just as easily be named, “How Not to Look Like an Idiot.”
