It’s never been easier to start a blog. So why is it so hard to have a wildly successful one?

To cobble the bard; “the fault, dear reader, is not in our blogs, but in ourselves.” It’s easy to start a blog. It’s hard to develop a unique voice and remarkable insight (a phrase I learned from Seth Godin’s book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Without either, you’re just another voice in the crowd. With both, you become indispensable.

To ask how to gain a unique voice and remarkable insight is missing the boat: If there was a step-by-step formula anyone could follow, the end result would be a crowd neither unique nor remarkable. To have both requires personal thought and experience at the very least, both of which you can neither skip the time and effort on to gain. Whichever your blog’s area of expertise, it’s as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in the context of creativity:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Or as Benjamin Franklin succinctly summed up: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”

1. Against the Voice of Should
2. How to Write Good: 5 Tips from a Paid Writer
3. For my Friends, the Makers of Things

Somewhere in our heads, if you listen hard enough, there is a voice that is the voice of Should. The voice of Should tells us how we should be doing things; how we should talk, how we should dress, how we should respond, how we should go along, how we should tolerate. And in my head, this voice tells me how I should write.

And every time we do, our real voice – our Soul’s voice – gets buried underneath sentences of sentences of what we should say, not what we want to say.

We die each time and we don’t know it.

A Writer’s Search for Meaning

And yet, in the quiet moments, our Soul’s voice finds sustenance. When we allow ourselves to simply speak our hearts – honestly, authentically – even if we break the rules of convention, our words find an audience. It is not the deft manipulation of words that resonate with us, but the touch of recognition one soul feels at listening to another soul’s voice, speaking over the voice of his shoulds. And we, when reading writing like that, aren’t as impressed by the message of the words as we are by its authenticity, because we too, yearn to express our souls like that.

1. A Unique Voice & Remarkable Insight
2. The Digital Clutter
3. To Write Like Nobody But Yourself

This post is for a friend whom I know has great stuff to share and just needs to write it all down. I hope it helps. Get your book out already, dude!

1. The Ultimate Secret to Writing

The ultimate secret to writing is the one that most people don’t seem to want to hear. And it’s simply this: keep working your ass off.

Are there freak geniuses that wake up in the morning, eyes blazing with divine inspiration who knock out thousands of pages before breakfast? Maybe, but I’m not one of them. I have to sit my ass down and sweat words before they even look halfway decent, writing even when I don’t feel like writing and churning paragraphs of rubbish. It’s hard.

But then, some days it isn’t hard. It’s graceful pirouettes all the way instead of thundering tumbles. Them’s the crazy breaks of the creative life. But you have to work regardless, whether it’s beautiful ballerina day or clumsy hippo night. Just sit yourself down, and keep typing, keep typing, keep typing.

2. Be Okay with Sucking Horrendously

You are not the lovechild of Shakespeare, Einstein and Amelia Earhart. Do not expect your first draft to be anything but shit. The good news is that gorgeous isn’t what you’re aiming for when you’re doing the first draft, the first draft is what you’re aiming for when you’re doing the first draft.

The shitty first draft isn’t optional, it’s the compulsory first step towards getting your final, beautiful thing shaped and crafted. It’s like sculpting – not that I’ve ever sculpted anything in my life. In the beginning, you chip off chunks and end up with a rough mess that’s nothing like the final product you see in your mind. But it’s okay. Chillax. Because making that mess just got you closer to the finished work.

3. ‘Cus You’re Just Getting Started

You wouldn’t expect an Olympic-class sprinter to roll out of bed, head straight to the tracks and blaze a record in his pajamas would you? Same thing for writing; don’t expect magic to come out of your fingers immediately, you have to get yourself warmed up first. Your fingers have to make the clackity noise for a while before your brain gets that you’re trying to type the next mega-bestseller. Switch off the MSN. Close the door. Be prepared to sit your ass down for a while. Start typing, your muscles are starting cold and it’s hard, but the longer you go on, the easier it’ll get.

4. Keep the Critic Waiting

If you’re like me, you hear a vicious, evil voice in your head whenever you make something that goes “you suck at this, you’ll never make anything good, what makes you think anyone wants to read what you’re writing?” It’s normal (I hope). Every creative person struggles with this inner demon (I hope). The important thing here is you have to learn to ignore the hell out of it when you’re writing or it will kill your child.

(By child I meant your manuscript. Sorry for being melodramatic.)

You need to learn that being creative and being critical are two essential but separate stages in the creative process. This is critical. There’s a place for this demon critic and it’s after you’ve finished your first draft, not before. When you’re done with that, let it go to town and rip your draft to shreds. That’s what it’s good for, listen to it then and it’ll help you see where your text sucks and help you make the revisions you need to make so it don’t suck no more. But never edit when you’re writing, because that opens the door for the demon to come in and destroy any creative spark you’re nurturing (and you need every creative spark you’ve got to make your words happen).

Keep the creative and critical parts of you separate, it’ll help you get your work done and keep you sane.

5. Start with What You’ve Got

Don’t know how to start? Me neither, but I still write pages and pages month after month. The trick is to start with what you’ve got; while your book needs a beginning, middle and end, nobody said you had to write in that order. Sometimes all I have is the middle, and I have no idea how to phrase the beginning, so instead of struggling, I write what I’ve got first. The crazy thing is that after I finish with what I’ve got, the rest of it comes a lot easier.

Not Convinced?

What’s that? Not convinced that your buddy who gets paid for his wordsmithory knows what he’s going about? Need to learn more? That’s cool. We all can do better and learn something new every step of the way, just don’t let the thought that you need to learn more stop you from starting. This isn’t rocket science. People have been writing since the first alphabet was invented. If you have a mind, pen and paper, you already have all the tools Shakespeare had at his disposal to write his masterworks.

These are the books I like. About writing and the creative process, I recommend The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield. To improve your writing, I recommend On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser and On Writing by Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King). About the creative process, read The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp. Read Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders newer blog posts for free. And watch this talk by mega-bestselling novel Eat Pray Love‘s author Elizabeth Gilbert about creative work; she speaks with experience, insight and humor.

Namaste. I hope this helps you give your gift to the world. Get your ass to work.

1. Unleashing Your Creative Monster: Say One Thing Strong
2. A Unique Voice & Remarkable Insight
3. To Write Like Nobody But Yourself

Why do I spend weeks on a blog post writing and editing it until I publish it?

The answer’s simple: it’s fun to spend time making something as good as I can make it before I show it to the world. And in a world where deadlines are the norm, taking the time to craft something until I’m happy with it is a pleasure. Because it matters to me that this is about creating something I can be proud of, and presenting that to the world in a way that is good.

The Japanese distinguish between two kinds of quality: atarimae hinshitsu – the idea that things work as they should, and miryokuteki hinshitsu – aesthetic quality on top of atarimae hinshitsu. What I want to do is to write posts that don’t just communicate, but communicate beautifully.

1. Unleashing Your Creative Monster: Be Proud
2. Are You a Word Document?
3. Why 21 Dragons Exists

There’s a difference between writing for yourself and writing for your reader, one that’s as clear as night and day.

It’s the difference between what the very smart Kathy Sierra describes as a company that kicks ass, versus a company that helps its users kick ass.

In one, you write to satisfy yourself. In the other, you write to satisfy your reader.

In one, you read your words with your eyes. In the other, you read your words with your reader’s eyes.

In one, you write staggeringly works of heartbreaking genius, and you don’t ever edit dammit because it’s all so mind-numbingly breathtakingly good. In the other, you slay your babies ruthlessly if they don’t serve your reader.

If you’re writing in service of your ego (this blog), anything goes and your ego’s free to write checks your body can’t cash. But that kind of writing is entirely different from writing in service of your reader (my magazine writing day job), where only what’s 100% useful for her gets printed.

As a technology writer with an overinflated opinion of himself, I have to be especially careful not to indulge in verbiage just to stroke my own ego while pushing my dear reader’s head below the heady waters of information overload just one more time because she really needs to know that digital camera sensors only record in black and white, color is added with a overlying color filter, the most common of which is a Bayer filter.

Stroke, stroke, stroke. Push, push, push.

Screw that. If any word doesn’t serve the reader, if it’s not essential, it goes out. Gone, deleted, fucking slayed.

Because you have to decide: are you out here for your ego, or are you out here for your reader. You can’t play both sides with your balls hanging on the fence.

Pick a side.

Write.

1. How to Write Good: 5 Tips from a Paid Writer
2. To Write Like Nobody But Yourself
3. Against the Voice of Should

Someone asked me why I love writing, and I couldn’t answer.

Why do some people like blueberry pie, a jazz solo or the smell of rain in the evenings? You can find a thousand reasons why you fall in love, but there’s only one real reason: you fall in love because you fall in love.

1. What Does ’21 Dragons’ Mean?
2. The Curious Case of the Missing Dragons
3. Perfection in Motion

Warning: The post below assumes you want to get better at blogging. If you’re blogging just for fun (hell, I am), this rant is not for you. It also contains snarky arrogance, so don’t read it if you’re not prepared to admit how wrong you are and how right I am about everything. Namaste.

Forget about sure-fire tips to wild blogging success, there are really only two secrets to be a successful blogger and I’ve found them:

1. Write well.

2. Or be a cute and nubile girl who blogs lots of photos of herself.

To everyone else who says you don’t need to write well to be a good blogger: that’s bloody stupid (cute and nubile girl photo-bloggers excluded). Blogging is a written medium and it is read. To say you don’t need to write well to create good reading is like saying you don’t have to cook well to make a good meal. To be good at your art invariably demands that you be good at your craft.

And this is art. Not Art with a capital ‘A’ that involves a lot of what-the-fuck moments, feigned understanding and pompous exclusion. But art because when it’s done well, it involves creativity, thought, and hopefully adds to the world of the person who’s reading it. Not unconsidered word vomit.

Web 2.0 Doesn’t Kill Good Writing

But Alvin, this is blogging! It’s not stodgy old literature or dusty cobwebbed print journalism. It’s Web 2.0 now, gramps, so suck it up and deal.

Well, fuck me. The arrival of blogging kills the craft of writing as much as the arrival of MP3s killed the craft of music. Don’t confuse the medium for the message. The fundamentals of quality work don’t change. A weblog is simply a technological tool that helps you publish your work online easily without hard-coding and FTP-ing. Simply put, a blog is an easy-to-use digital pen.

Just like a more expensive camera won’t automatically make you a better photographer, a new pen won’t automatically make you a better writer. Pens don’t write words, people write words. And you’re stuck with you, no matter which social media is your choice of poison.

As John Gruber says so succinctly;

The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry — which exists as the sort of pimply teenage brother to the shirt-and-tie SEO industry — is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

This is what pisses me off so much about people who proclaim the coming of blogs/Facebook/Twitter as the second, third and fourth coming of the Internet that will revolutionize your life. Does it change your life? Hell yes. Does it make you more compelling just because you now have a louder microphone? Hell no. The Internet is not a magic pill. You’ll become awesome by becoming awesome, not by pressing a button.

Or become awesome by uploading lots of photos of yourself (hint: doesn’t work if you’re not cute, nubile and female).

Notice the awesomeness of this blog just explode by five times? 'Nuff said.

What if I’m not Cute & Nubile or I am and I Just Want to be Twice as Awesome?

‘Write well’ is a blanket term that’s easy to say and harder to define. Merlin Mann probably put it best when he said:

Topic times voice. Or, if you’re a little bit more of a maverick, obsession times voice. So what does that mean? I think all of the best nonfiction that has ever been made comes from the result of someone who can’t stop thinking about a certain topic — a very specific aspect of a certain topic in some cases. And second, they got really good at figuring out what they had to say about it.

Topic, interest or obsession is your thing. What you love is something you find on your own – that’s all you. To write well, ‘voice’ can be broken down into technique and opinion. Technique without opinion leads to staleness, while opinion without technique leads to inelegance. Nobody can help you with opinion if you don’t have one, but luckily there are many sources for technique.

Pick up On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William K. Zinsser or On Writing by Stephen King. Listen to John Gruber & Merlin Mann’s Blogging Panel at SxSW ’09. Then dive in and do your darnest. Think about what you want to say with each post. Be as original as you can. Try different ways of arranging your words. Think about how this post adds or doesn’t add to your reader’s life. Let your draft rest for a couple of days before re-reading it again and see what new ideas turn up. Edit and trim your work so you publish a polished piece not a hasty first draft.

You take care of the way you present yourself for an important date, why not do the same for the words you present to the rest of the world? Good writing is a pleasure to read, and you want to show the people who visit your online house a good time, not stick them in the barn and feed them rotten cabbage.

I know I sound like an elitist arrogant smart-ass writing-Nazi, but the last thing I want to do is scare anyone away from trying a new creative endeavor. Having worked in creative fields all my life, I know how rewarding the creative act can be and how daunting it can look like to outsiders – when creativity is really just practice, work, trying and falling and trying again. Don’t assume you have to be a licensed ‘creative professional’ to be creative, I’ve seen enough of clueless professionals and astounding amateurs’ work to know different.

Yes, it can be really hard at times (and I’ve fallen off the bandwagon so many times), but when you make something you can be proud of, it pays off so many times over. And there’s no better time to try this than now, when the means to broadcast your voice to the entire world can be both easy and free with just a WordPress or Twitter sign-up.

And have fun. Because if you’ve never had fun, aren’t having fun and think you’ll never have fun writing, then blogging isn’t the creative medium for you. Thank God there are countless others. I can’t dance for fuck but maybe you can.

Good luck and good hunting.

P.S. The last time I wrote a post like this, some helpful person wrote a comment about traffic. Yes, I know traffic, thank you. But all the cute SEO tricks in the world won’t help you if you write badly. And this is the blog where I don’t fucking care.

1. Against the Voice of Should
2. Recovering from Imperfections
3. The Writer’s Ego

Yesterday, a friend of mine read an article I wrote, and said the writing in the article read like the way I spoke. It sounds like a duh thing to say, but to me, it’s the highest compliment possible, because for me, it’s the hardest thing to do.

It takes me a lot of effort to make my writing sound as natural as possible without sounding like a PR drone, to remove as many layers between myself and my reader as I can with as authentic a voice as I can muster. To say things not in the way I think I should say them, but in the way I do say them.

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn’t. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or believe you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn’t.
It’s the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

– e.e.cummings

1. Love Your Words
2. The Beginner’s Mind Sucks But You Still Need It
3. A Letter to a Young Colleague