The Process of Writing a Post

Some days writing a blog post is as easy as watching TV.  Ideas and words seem to flow as if by magic.  I have tried to pin point why this is.  Is it what I’m writing about?  Is it the mood I’m in?  The kind of day I’ve had?  I’ve determined that a big part of it depends on what I’m writing about.  If I’m telling a story, or writing about something important or close to my heart, the words come more easily.  This makes sense to me.  Most of those posts are ideas that I have thought about over and over again in the general context of life.  When I struggle to come up with an idea, I struggle to write once I’ve thought of something.  It’s like I don’t have an investment in the idea.

I don’t plan out my posts.  I have a list of ideas that I pull from (sometimes), but I usually don’t do any writing until I’m getting ready to post.  This is mainly because I feel like I don’t have time to work on writing more than one in a day.  It can be frustrating to sit and stare at the computer screen, writing a line, deleting, writing almost the exact same line, deleting, and going back to staring at the screen.  Inevitably these turn out to be the posts that I am unsatisfied with, but I believe there is much value to going through the writing process.

I find there have been fewer days where I sit and stare at the screen.  However, there are some parts of the writing process that I don’t think will ever improve.  For instance, I always fear grammatical errors and typos.  I try to review every post before I publish it, but sometimes your eyes see what they think they are supposed to be seeing.  Every so often the errors slip through the cracks.  Oh, the embarrassment!  I immediately edit the post to fix the error, hoping that no one read it in the meantime.

I would say 50% of the time I will think of something else that I should have included, or think of a better way to phrase what I already wrote.  Sometimes the ideas come within 5 minutes, sometimes it’s not until the next day.  I typically don’t revise or add to posts once they’ve been published.  Perhaps I should.  Actually, I think what this tells me is that I should write my posts out ahead of time and ruminate on them before publishing.  If only I could be that organized and on the ball.

I’d like to be able to say that blogging has gotten easier over the last sixty days, but I think I’m still trying to figure it out.  Still trying to find a focus.  At least it hasn’t gotten any harder, and I’ll take that for the time being!