Thinking about blogging

I’ve been thinking about blogging recently. How others do it. The things I’ve learned.
Writers create, write and keep up blogs for a number of reasons. Many do it to help promote their work or to build an audience while they’re working on a novel, play, magazine or whatever. Some do it for money, others do it for the sheer heck of it.

For me, Write for Your Life is a place to reflect on and think about the challenges I’ve faced (and continue to face) as a writer. It’s not about saying, ‘Ooh, look at me, aren’t I special.’ It’s about sharing and caring. ‘This is my experience. This is how it affected me.’

I say this because, in this day and age, it’s extremely easy to start a blog and dish out advice without ever pausing for thought. In the endless hunt for comments and pageviews, too much opinion and personal experience gets passed off as fact, when actually, us writers are in a very subjective business. There are few certainties and plenty of options.

I didn’t (really) make any blog-related resolutions for the year, but I have reaffirmed a few personal guidelines:

Write from experience.

Tell the truth.

Be helpful.

Enjoy it.

And finally, when there is something to sell or promote, which inevitably there will be, I’ll aim to do so with thought, discretion and infinite politeness.