“A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list.”
— Unknown
I never thought I’d be a blogger.
I can remember, ‘back in the day’ of Xanga and the like, when the thought of blogging seemed like nothing more than a glorified diary…only put out there where anyone could read it. I didn’t exactly get the appeal.
My first attempt at keeping a blog didn’t happen until I moved to London after college graduation. I managed all of three posts before it came to a premature, if not a rightful, end. The posts were again of the “Where we went and what we did” nature and I could never get into a good rhythm with it.
And then came New Zealand and my decision to pursue the master’s in travel writing course I’m now enrolled on. “If I don’t do this now,” I told myself, “There will never be any hope of it happening.” Thankfully, it worked. I made a transition from the diary-entry kind of post to one that incorporated my own discovery of the country’s culture and history, weaving in personal anecdotes from my work and travel experiences.
Even then, however, it wasn’t as if I was writing in the standard blog format, never holding myself to a maximum word count of 800 or so words or keeping to small paragraphs and attention-grabbing visuals.
I suppose the important thing was that I was writing, even if not in the correct format. I remember hitting a record high of some 11,000 words for an epic entry on the Treaty of Waitangi, a post that was most likely read by all of one person, my dear friend Steve, a Kiwi lawyer who always pointed me in the right direction of learning about his country.
Looking at posts from even a year and a half ago, it’s so easy to be embarrassed. Like old cringe-worthy photos of yourself, all I really want to do is take them down and keep them out of the blogosphere forever. But again, just like those old photos, old posts often exist to show just how far you’ve come and all the ways in which your writing style has grown and changed. As much as we cringe, we need such signposts to mark our journey.
All of this is to say, as I sat in my lounge last week working on my post on Sunday roast in England, I stopped myself halfway through the process and asked, “What is it about this that I enjoy so much?”
Maybe it was researching the tradition, maybe it was crafting my thoughts into a kind of ordered narrative, or maybe it was going through the photographs I’d taken and selecting which ones I wanted to include, but I couldn’t help thinking, there’s really something to this, isn’t there?
The recent announcements of WordPress’s Challenge for 2011, their Daily Post page designed to inspire bloggers to post once a day, and the 1000-1000 Travel Blog Challenge (aiming for 1,000 visits/day and earning $1000/month) all show that I’m not alone–there’s a heck of a lot of people out there who seem to have hit a golden rhythm, who have found their blog is as much a part of their daily routine as is reading the paper and tying their shoes every morning.
And all this putting together of each post is actually somewhat of an art form to me, the twenty-first century means of personal expression. And there’s no one I can think of who best exemplifies this than my friend Ariel, one of my best friends from high school and now a blogger I constantly look to for inspiration.
While working towards a master’s in fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, Ariel started her blog, Artfully Awear, that now combines her love of fashion with her passion for art history, showcasing beautiful outfits she’s put together that coordinate with a major artist or art style. Her premise is incredibly unique and I’ve loved watching her take off in the fashion blogging world.
Another one of the travel bloggers I met in Copenhagen is Nicole from Bitten by the Travel Bug. One of her recent posts focuses on what she learned in 2010–about travelling, about blogging, and about herself. I loved what she wrote under the second section: “Blogging is only a chore if you make it a chore.”
And I love that, both for me and for so many other amazing people I’ve met this past year, blogging has become so much than a chore; it’s become not only a channel for creative expression, but a way of life.
Because anything that gets you creating is a good thing, right?
Great post! It really is true about the cringe-worthyness of previous posts etc, I was trying to find a specific photo last night that i thought i’d seen on facebook but couldn’t find so i resorted to ye old myspace page which is only open still so that if the need be for digging out old photos I don’t have with me it’s there and yes some of the posts i have on there are very cringe-worthy. Can’t wait for the roast blog!
Thank you for the sweet mention! I, too, have discovered that once I found my niche in the blogosphere, it was no longer a chore, as you said, to maintain my little corner of the internet, but it became a real passion. In my opinion, those who truly succeed at blogging do it as much for themselves as they do for their readers. And I believe you, my dear, fit into that category!