In my last post, I promised to provide some measure of methodology to help a blogger create good posts whenever necessary, whether inspired or not. But before I do that, I want to take a half-step back and emphasize that these ideas are not intended to help generate empty, vapid posts just to fill up a page (although you certainly could). It’s not about being a “hack,” it’s about creating a methodology that points your nose in the right direction when you need to write, but can’t muster the traction to do so. It’s hard to be prolific if you demand 100% inspiration of yourself, all the time. Even such visionaries as Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali had methodologies for generating new ideas - and though they have certainly been called many things over the years, I don’t think “hack” would be a fair assessment.
I’d mentioned the tyranny of the blank page - basically the overwhelming feeling you can get when standing on the brink of a task; an existential nausea of a sort, the paralyzing darkness staring back at you. It’s the the inertia of the eternal, and it has serious mass. But, you really can sidestep it if you have a method.
Certainly less famous than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s “God is in the details” quote, would be Professor Wayne Taylor’s “constraints give you freedom” quote - one that I found puzzling and quite counterintuitive as a 19-year-old design undergrad. It sounds like scary doublethink, perhaps some kind of creeping fascism, at first blush. This really isn’t the case - Wayne was right as far as design goes, and I’ll show you why.
The most prolific songwriter I know said “when I set a goal for myself of writing 300 songs in a year, there were days when I just had nothing. But I’d write a song anyway. It could be a song about frogs - about anything at all. I’d just be sure I wrote a song. I didn’t expect all the songs to be good, that wasn’t the point.” So if you’d like, you can simply sidestep the problem in this way - the “better done than good” approach. I think we can shoot for quality here too - but we’ll need a methodology to get us there.
Narrow your topic, create a ruleset
Realize that the first step to constraining yourself lies within your topic focus. Yes, you can write about anything. But should you? In my experience, things come easier when you know what your focus is - which can in some cases be refined by determining what your focus is not. If your blog has a chosen topic focus, you’ve already accomplished this critical step, whether you realize it or not. In design terms, you’re “defining the design problem” - as a blogger, you’re laying out the boundaries on your mental map - a topical topographic, perhaps. “I write about politics” or “I write about motorcycles” will work, as will “I don’t write about Bretton Woods monetary policy” or “Modern supersport bikes are for the birds” when you’re trying to ratchet down tightly on your focus area.
Chess has a set of rules - you play on an 8 x 8 checkerboard, and all possible movement is predefined - but the outcomes are not. The classic arcade game “Asteroids” had a very simple ruleset and a defined screen area, yet allowed for infinite movement (if you go off the screen, you reappear on the other side) in a finite space. You can create a ruleset for your topic focus, yet retain a rich set of possibilities, in the same way. Think about your favorite blogs. What is their ruleset? What would their defining characteristics be? You can define them easily by what they focus on, and rather wholly by what they do not focus on.
Now ask yourself, “what is my ruleset?” And get to writing it down.
Research your topic area
Now that we’ve defined the territory (or “tightened the palette” for you art folks) it’s time to go deep. Do some research on your chosen topic area. Yes, I know, that sounds like work. And… it is. But it is also fun, and will literally drop ideas off at your mental doorstep. This will also help your blog become more authoritative, a characteristic fast becoming critical for larger success in the blogosphere.
Also, it’s a good idea to know what ideas currently exist in “your” space. Historically, rivals were well aware of each other’s work - Newton versus Leibniz over “the calculus,” The Beatles and the Beach Boys working on their respective 1967 master works, the teams of Werner Von Braun and Sergei Korolev racing each other to be the first to the Moon… you get the idea. You too can stand on the shoulders of giants - and with such tools as Wikis and search engines to use, the world is your oyster. What are others saying about your chosen topic? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Does it lead you to consider a different opinion, or approach? What do you like about what you’ve discovered? What do you dislike? Already, we’ve chased away the tyranny of the blank page and replaced it with a world of focused possibilities.
And should you decide to incorporate serious research into your posts, be sure to properly attribute the research. It goes a long way to making everyone happy.
Broaden your subtopics - ideation
Now that we’ve tightened the overall focus, and have educated ourselves on the chosen subject matter, what more can we do? Well, we can allow our topic to grow with variation and color. This brings a new depth and multiple levels of interest to your writing, and is an ideation process of a sort. Ideation is simply the point at which you generate ideas, hopefully taking note of them along the way. This is the “sky’s the limit” portion of the process, where you can create a broad variety of iterations of your main topic. Regardless of your chosen topic, there are almost certainly other disciplines that have touched on your subject. You can celebrate them as a means of ideation. I’m referring to, in no particular order:
Songs
Photographs
Tapestries
Paintings
Plays
Movies
Operas
Art Installations
Sculpture
Conceptual products and art
Games
Books
Other Blogs
… having to do with your subject matter. These can also be used as the basis for your research. I’m sure that there are other subtopics that I haven’t considered, so part of your method can be listing additional subtopics for your topic area, using the above list as a healthy starting point. Go crazy! This is where you can shoot for the moon. If it touches (or opposes, or complements) your topic area, it’s fair game. If you choose you can even narrow that list, for an even tighter focus, or to save some material for a future date. Bringing us to…
Pace yourself
You wouldn’t expect (nor want) a novel or a film to give you everything in the first 5 minutes. Artistically, that’s not particularly interesting anyway - my brother (the theater major) would say that it “condescends to the audience participant,” and ends up falling flat, for lack of fostering any kind of intrigue. You have, potentially, a lifetime to explore your topic. There’s no reason that you can’t explore it at an easy pace, allowing you and your readers to know the topic inside and out. This also gives you a lot of breathing room, alleviating the feeling that you have burned through “all there is to say” too quickly.
This will also help remove some of the mental burden of trying to cram 100 gallons of information into a 5 gallon post. You can break it out over several posts - in fact, it’ll be easier on the reader that way. This works unless your chosen subject requires immediacy, in which case you might not have the luxury of too much ideation - for instance, if you focus on breaking news of whatever type.
But, for the majority of bloggers, the end result happens when you take the results from your wild ideation spree from the previous step, pick a subtopic and approach you like, and write.Certainly, don’t forget to take an editing pass. And finally, congratulations - the page is blank no more! You broke through.
Generating your own methodology
Certainly, the above steps are neither all inclusive, nor meant to be any kind of authoritative, rigorous standard that separates wheat from chaff. But, it is a methodology, whereas before you may have had none - and using it can get you through rough patches, or even take your blog to the next level. Certainly you can create your own process if you’d like, or you can simply recognize and refine any process that you are already using, whether it is a deliberate conscious process, or one that you use unknowingly.
The California Superbike School regularly improves riders by simply making them aware of the decisions they make while riding - as a writer, what are the decisions that you make when you choose to write? I think there’s value in simply recognizing and enumerating any unconscious decisions made - this exposes them to your conscious mind, at which point you can actively choose to alter or abolish those decisions, or add new ones. This becomes a fairly enlightening self-exploration if taken seriously enough - and could easily provide material for blogging in its own right.
Though it be madness, there is method in it
For the final installment of this series, I’ll examine some of the wilder methodologies employed by some of history’s most well-known creators and makers. Hopefully you’ll find it entertaining, and potentially inspiring!
Continue Reading Part 3
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