B – Blog

When I was in college, and answering the question of “what I wanted to do when I grew up,” my answer was inevitably writer or author or something of the type. The follow-up question became “do you have a blog?” Blogs had become the big thing, of a sudden, it seemed. I had written some travel stories, mainly, in a Live Journal… I had joined others in creating fiction on forums… Social Media was just catching its stride with the advent of Facebook… I had competed in NaNoWriMo… but no, I did not have a blog.

After college, there were a number of years where I did little or no writing, and it was during these years it might have been nice to have had a blog. However, even as I started my Master’s and they had us create a blog (the very foundations of this blog here), I did not use this for the writing I could have been doing. You can see a big gap in the archives from the blog’s start, in 2009, and when I later took a course on blogging that had me blogging more in earnest.

However, a blog is really more of a delivery method, and also an interface. It’s not a driving force in-and-of itself. Having a blog does not make one write. You can see this in any number of blogs which start up, have some steam, and then just lose it and disappear. Honestly, this blog has looked like that at a number of points in its lifetime.

So the question asking me if I had a blog was like asking if I used Word, or if I shared my fiction on Facebook. It’s about getting known and presence, or about where and how you write. I hope now that people are forming this question more carefully when they ask young students, so they don’t just feel dumb for not having a blog. Because having a blog does not make you a writer. Writing does. Having something to write is what helps you write. And, if you figure out what that something is and it happens to be a blog, make a blog. Look for the right place to blog. I still hold that someday I am going to write fiction and put it on Tumblr. But holding the Tumblr real-estate down has not made me write the stories.

It’s the overall audience-finding, content-creator connection to content-consumer aspect of a blog which is powerful for a writer, and these sorts of benefits can come from good branding and a good social media presence in general. Twitter can be huge, and lots of writers are hanging out there, waiting for you to read their books. Should you have a blog? Maybe. I think the main answer I would give is have a blog if you’re going to write the blog: a blog without content is a webpage. You should maybe have one of those. And blogging, as a public, interactive thing, brings along interactive, social media elements that are important. But be ready for that.

What do you think? Do you need to have a blog as a writer? Let me know what you think in the comments below!