A Spork in the Road

One of my favorite bloggers, Tom Johnson, has written both in his blog and in publications like the STC’s Intercom about the importance of having a focal topic for one’s blog, and I’ve seen this sentiment echoed throughout the blogosphere.

One of my all-time favorite novelists, Sean Stewart, has talked about the importance — when writing a novel — of asking oneself whether each scene relates to the major themes of the book. This, of course, presupposes that your book has major themes and that you, as novelist, are aware of them.

It was Tom’s writing about blogging (in addition to his blog itself) that finally gave me the tools to make this blog take off. My former blog was anemic and badly tended, with random posts about random topics interspersed through the months with no regularity or common theme.

This blog, on the other hand, has a clearly stated focus (the intersection of the creative and the technical), and while I’m not afraid to stray from the main topic of the blog, the very fact of having a main topic has been crucial in enabling me to post almost daily.

I used to open up my blog and stare at the screen, wondering what to write. Now if I’m not sure, I hold up the blog’s purported theme and look for something in the week’s experience that relates to it. For the first time ever, I actually have a backlog of blog topics to write about.

Likewise, I’m finally making some real headway with my first novel, more than five years after I started it. The piece of the puzzle that fell into place was my spending serious time thinking about what the novel was really about, instead of flailing around writing scene after scene and hoping they would all eventually cohere. It seems painfully obvious, but it’s amazing how loath I was to do the work of finding “what the book is about.” Now that I have a bead on it, the entire book seems to be blossoming in my head, and every time I start to get stuck on a scene, I go back to the main themes of the book and ask how the scene relates to them.

So back to blogging, in thinking about Tom’s question to me of what clicked with this blog, here is my summary answer:

1. Reading Tom’s articles about blogging in general;
2. More specifically, choosing a topic that is interesting and relevant for me;
3. Prioritizing my blog and allowing myself permission to blog during the workday;
4. Limiting myself to one post a day so I don’t burn out.

That’s it! Research, focus, self-permission and discipline.

Which, of course, applies equally well to writing novels.