When You Talk All I Hear is Blog…

When you start writing for a blog it’s a lot like a gateway drug… or so I’d assume. Having never actually had any experience with drugs or anything like that, I can tell you that blogging quickly becomes an addiction and a frame of mind. Alternatively, you could think of a blog is an outlet for expressing your feelings or spontaneous ideas much like Twitter.  Twitter is a great social media site, but I am on Google Plus myself.  Twitter is a great micro-blogging platform, and if you’re a writer you already know this.  A blog has one major difference.

And that is? The only difference is this post is already more than 140 characters… lucky readers.

I find that my experiences day-to-day can really inspire my posts even though my daily activities don’t directly relate writing or living a life of writing. For example, I got some inspiration from an interview for med school last year for a post. In my experience this makes a blog a little more relatable, however it isn’t always the default for people who are writing for a blog.  People write blogs for all sorts of reasons, and while most of it is to get your name out there, some are writing a blog for money, some for sharing their knowledge and some just because they have something to say and can’t stop blogging about it.  I know it’s a way to talk to people, but living doesn’t mean one thing at a time, it means constant learning and growing.  I think that’s why we blog, and blog and do it some more.

This month we are discussing our experiences and so it seems fitting to share with you my experiences with blogging because it has been a transition. I started off blogging in a more “rigid” way. I took our theme for a month and focused on how that directly related to writing and living a life of writing. This can be intimidating for people when they are thinking about starting a blog. But may I set your mind at ease and say that I found some of my best blog posts came from a more creative and seemingly “unrelated” inspiration.  The more experience I have outside of writing the more I have to let you, my readers relate to me.  It’s growing as a person first and then as a writer, or an artist or anything.  Then it’s blogging about it because it’s something I’m totally digging, and I have to blog about it quickly to get my feelings out.

This blog for instance is called “Living a Life of Writing,” and that’s not just writing, it’s living. So it is about more than refining your writing and developing writing strategies. It is about our lives as a writers and when you have a healthy balance your life is more than writing, but that life can influence your writing and THAT is what this blog is really about.  It’s growing it is a blog with attitude, it is a blog that makes me want to blog, and it is a wonderful website (if you don’t mind my saying so.)  It lets me get specific but not too specific.

It’s nice to offer advice to writers on how to write, but to get too specific is limited in its usefulness on an individual level. I had to come to terms with the fact that my ideas and opinions from my life as a writer just weren’t always going to mesh with the lives of other writers. For example, not everyone writes a blog or is on one of the many social networking sites, but I hope that from this month’s posts on blogging experiences people of various writing media can take something away, even if it’s just entertainment for a few quick minutes.

I mean, what’s this post even really about? To be honest I was inspired by our blog’s new look and the enthusiasm of our readers to write a little something. No specific topic. No specific advice. Just writing for the sake of writing (and sharing). And shouldn’t that be what writing is really about anyway?