Blogging Life: Writing Something vs Writing ABOUT Something

In many ways, I've always felt that blogging is one of the more interesting beasts in the greater world of writing.

When I was a youngster, I really wanted to become a writer. But I had no clear sense of what that meant. In it's earliest iterations I thought in terms of becoming an author who wrote novels, but that part soon fell apart because it turned out I really didn't have much of a knack for story development.

In time, I learned that I was much better at nonfiction, and specifically nonfiction as it related to things I was interested in, such as psychology and self-development and The Human Condition, in general.

Taking those particular things seriously typically involved writing actual articles for magazines - yes, I was doing this long before there was such a thing as Hive! And that was the way until that magic thing known as a Blog came along in the late 1990s.

Suddenly, we had self-publishing and for an audience! What a concept!

The thing about blogging - and why I have stuck to it for all these years - is that blogs allow us to wander all over the place. I've been able to throw away the restrictions of having to "write articles" of a particular length, on a particular subject, because that's what a magazine editor wants and instead just do something with a lot more creative freedom.

Of course, I have a considerably more scattered brain than most people, as a result of which sometimes I'm writing about cats, and sometimes I'm writing about beachcombing, and sometimes I'm writing about psychology, and sometimes I'm writing about blockchain and crypto stuff.

There's a freedom in that that you simply don't get from other formats. And by having something we could call a personal blog we get to choose our own subject matter and are not necessarily tied in by the boundaries of a particular niche we are expected to stick to.

I am well familiar with niche blogging, having had to stick within those boundaries for a number of years after Facebook "took over the world" and pretty much did away with the early incarnations of personal blogging (or what we might have called "social blogging") that was prevalent during the first few years of the 2000s.

I suppose some might regard it as editorial laziness that I don't care for"topics," but I really enjoy the fact that at a venue like Hive I can sit down and just start writing, I don't necessarily have to write about something, where "something" might be how to change the spark plugs in a certain car or how to fix a lawn mower or something to do with installing security software on your computer.

Editorial laziness or not, I find that it is a far more creative way to write. Some of my best writing has always come from a flow-of-consciousness approach; it's something I simply can't accomplish when I have to write to a writing prompt.

Of course, we're all different, and some folks love the structure and feel lost without it. We each have to find our individual creative writing paths!

Thanks for stopping by and have a great remainder of your week!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2023-09-20 00:50 PDT
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