I’m trying to get into blogging again so this is rambling.
Brian O’Connell interviewed me about phone addiction recently and I do think people are addicted to the scroll. I’m on Twitter too much, though I schedule my tweets so there’s that there is my excuse… Twitter roared into life and culture around 12 years ago and became big for a while. It allowed the instant spreading of thoughts or headlines and allowed people to react to it. If you blogged back then there was no way you could just fire off two sentences and that was enough. Explain yourself boy, elaborate what you mean kid, we didn’t come to your website for two lines of anything. With Facebook and Twitter feeds, we never left those spaces to read, one short bit after another was there.
I was going through how many winners of the Blog Awards ended up writing books. The original Blog Awards, mind, not the one that tried to trade off the thing I helped to start. My God there is some amount of authors from the list of winners. It goes to show that maybe the fair judging system combined with the raw talent that was there, writing, reading, giving feedback and creating a community gave people a road and map to keep going. They were going to be writers anyway, let’s be clear, their talent was there already.
Twenty Major. Grandad, Shane Hegarty, Sinéad Gleeson, Sweary Lady, Beaut.ie’s Aisling, Panti, Donal Skehan, Arseblog,Nessa Robins, Annie Atkins.
You read it so much in interviews that the advice for writing from writers is just sit down and write. Create a routine and stick to it. A habit. Publishers also talk about recruiting people that have pre-made audiences so it is easier to sell them a book.
Anyway, why I got on to this was I found it really hard to write my 13th Ones to Watch post.It was a relief getting it done but it felt more rewarding too. This blog post I’m writing now feels like it is doing to stay around for a while, for years or longer. While my tweets are findable, they don’t feel permanent. Yet I’m firing off tweets all the time.
During the year there were so many times I wanted to write something but it was easier to write a tweet storm/Twitter thread. Perhaps it was the instant gratification of a Like or Retweet when tweeting and also perhaps banging out 140 characters or basically a one liner after another and another is much easier than stringing sentences and paragraphs together that have to flow. Twitter is writing bullet points whereas blogging is fleshing out the table of contents. We saw it back then with blogging, someone would take time off and then they were gone for good, not coming back.
I remember an old teacher of mine talking about Lent and how it is much easier to give something up than taking something on. I guess Twitter became the easier thing for many of us or even not Twitter but regular life. I used to write two blog posts a day for a few years. I had 2000 visits a day to this blog too. A habit. I got nothing done in my day job… 🙂
The people that make writing look easy I’m sure worked really hard to make it look that easy. The finished smooth work needed plenty of attention. Even now as I write this blog post I have various sentences that I’m writing out with points that I want to make and then I’ll create “joining sentences” or “bridging sentences” maybe? to stitch together these little islands of thoughts. This blog post is going to go through many edits, deletions and expansions before you get to see it. And it will probably sit there for a day or two but I hope no longer as I’ll not come back for weeks. Even writing this now I feel like the writing is helping me structure thoughts in my head. Writing brings clarity of thought.
And now I pick up on writing this a day later but at least I went off and wrote another blog post in the mean time which I’m happy about.
There’s been a big drop off in blogging by the people I know and a whole new wave of bloggers that have come in. Maybe we’ll see a new wave of authors come out of the current blogging community or maybe the creativity will have an outlet elsewhere? There have been Twitter users that have ended up creating books from these spaces though a lot of them seem like a book of fortune cookie phrases or one liner jokes. Sorry Gerry. What seems to work though is a single topic Twitter account such as The Irish For that makes so much sense to be made into a reference book of sorts. Which can then extend into something more for the next book/iteration. We’ve seen Facebook Groups create books too with “Oh my God What a Complete Aisling” turning into a book. The creators have mentioned though, like great comedians, they honed their skills over time before they produced this great work. This work has the legs to be a book, a play, a musical and TV show. A world was created in that Facebook Group.
Podcasts are being snapped up by studios like Netflix and others to option for TV shows and movies and books too. I would like to see more blogging from people in my social networks but it’s very hard to create this habit and kick another one but maybe where hard work and toiling of a craft come together no matter the media, we might see new creations and new works come out that will end up on book shelves or on the radio or TV, if we make a habit of it.