Blog writing conundrums

No, this isn’t a writing challenge, it’s me reflecting on some of the things I was thinking about over the weekend.

I was lucky enough to get away for a few days to the Island of Arran – one of my favourite places in Scotland – if not the world. (The picture here is of the boats in the wee harbour next to the big ferry port at Brodick.)

Now rest assured I didn’t spend the whole weekend thinking about blogging… but the time and space away did give me a chance to think about some of the conundrums that I think beset all of us at times.

Blogging is fun, creative, inspiring, addictive – but it’s also time-consuming and hard work. Sometimes we need to take a break – to put things back into perspective, to work out what we’re doing it for. (I know I’m not alone here)

Sometimes it doesn’t seem ‘worth’ the effort that goes into it. Which is a sentence that needs a lot of unpicking I know. Does it mean changing the amount of effort that goes in or reconfiguring our expectations about the benefits… Or both.

I’m interested – really interested – in the possibilities of developing a different model for some of my online writing coaching. Which is why I’ve signed up for the Teaching Sells program that Brian and Tony Clark are running. More on this later (especially if they’re going to introduce an affiliate program…) but already I can see lots of possibilities for creating the kind of learning environment – the place where I can coach people to write with confidence – that I’ve been imagining but didn’t know how to create – up to now.

The Teaching Sells model also challenges some of the assumptions we have about products – which means I’m putting on hold my plans to publish (even in digital form) the coaching toolkit I’ve been working on. It might make a lot more sense to use that toolkit as the foundations for an on-line course, once I’ve created the space in which to run it.

There’s a big blogging question that their model poses too – about the relationship between paid for content and the free coaching material we provide through our blogs, about how to maintain and protect the free exchange of ideas and possibilities that blogs offer, the chance to develop connections, networks, friendships, communities around our own blogs and those of other people… And as that is the part I enjoy the most – whatever I do needs to sit within that framework of inter-connected learning and sharing.

And on a more prosaic level I find myself almost at the end of the month and I know I’m nowhere near through all the things I still wanted to cover on writing with clarity. What Zinsser has to teach us about clear writing. Things we need to get clear about before we start – not just the container for our writing but our purpose, intention, motivation. Getting clear on who we’re writing for and why.

The switch to writing with more focus and intention at Confident Writing – including the monthly themes – has been liberating in lots of ways. I know for sure I’ll never run out of things to say! And I like the way the theme thickens, changes, develops through the course of the month as we exchange ideas, tips, thoughts and writing suggestions. But there’s an element of frustration too at the things that need to go unsaid in order to keep the demands on my writing time – and your reading time – to manageable proportions.

Those are some of the blogging conundrums that are on my mind at the start of this week. I don’t know if any of them sound like yours – those you’re facing, have worked through or left behind – or if you have different challenges facing you?

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