So you decided to undertake a wittle writing project for you blog. Look at you! Trying things. That’s great. But now you’re thinking “Hmm, writing is kinda hard. It’d be way easier to drink a beer or three, doomscroll for a bit (boy what’s happening in Gaza sure is bad, huh?), land on a post from one of your favorite pornstars, open up PornHub, type her name, click through the seventy billion pages of videos, most of them duplicates of one another, search for one you haven’t seen before, even though you really want one you have seen before but you pretend that porn actually helps introduce novelty into your life by showing you aspects of human sexuality you might not otherwise be exposed to, land on a video produced (have you really been watching internet porn that long?) 15 years ago, reflect how the people depicted in it don’t really even exist anymore, the intervening time so great that you are in effect watching ghosts fuck each other, the morbid reality of that realization inspiring the ambient concern that you somehow have become an ersatz necrophiliac, without even the courage to exhume a physical corpse, none of this stopping you from ejaculating some 15-35 minutes later, making a mess on your hand and in your pubic hair, at which point you pause the video, an obscene close up left on screen as you go to retrieve a tissue, and then another, and then another.”
But you didn’t do that! Good for you. Gold star. Still, you’re not sure what direction to take this wittle bitty project. So let’s brainstorm the FUCK out of some super awesome things you can do!
Dear Diary AKA The Livejournal Method
A long, long time ago (Star Wars reference), way back in the early Web 2.0 days, people blogged. What did they blog about? Their lives! Teens sat in class, ate lunch, hung out with their friends, went to rehearsal for the spring musical (Bye Bye Birdie), came home, then fired up that old Windows XP and logged into Livejournal to write about their secret crushes, how Dad and Mom took their Nokia away, whether they passed their driver’s test, and which Dashboard Confessional song they were feeling the most like that week. Obviously it’s “Saints and Sailors”:
Unfortunately, you may not be a teenager any more. Sad to say, but that’s the way of life. Yeah, part of the mystique of blogging was implanted in your mind at that age, and there’s some regret you still hang on to for not having thrown yourself more fully into the blogosphere back then, because maybe if you had, you wouldn’t be here now, long after the wave’s broken, thinking “if I just commit myself to an insane blog project maybe I can revitalize this stupid website that’s supposed to help me build an audience, even though no one reads blogs any more.” Maybe you’d have a successful podcast with people you met online 15 years ago, or you’d be published by New York Tyrant, and maybe you’d have moved to Brooklyn and met Honor Levy at some gallery opening. But that’s not what you want, is it? Do you know what you want? It’s not clear you do. Your compulsions and neuroses suggest you want to scold yourself and repeatedly subject yourself to the pain of trying methods you know will fail. You also clearly do not want to reveal too much about yourself, or else you wouldn’t have veered into this hypothetical, speaking in the second person, in the midst of the section about how one easy thing to do on a blog is to write about yourself. The repressed always returns.
Anyway, what was I saying?
Writing Advice
You’re a writer, write? Ha ha, puns. Why not offer up some hard-earned wisdom about the writing process? People always love that. Especially people who, rather than writing, spend hours searching for “writing tips.” Here, let’s give it a shot:
Everyone says the most important part of writing is sitting your butt in that chair, greasing up the typewriter with a big can of WD-40, winding some paper you stole from work into it, and click-click-clickity clacking one word after another. Doesn’t matter if the words are good, or if you don’t have any ideas, or if you’re just writing to aggrandize your ego without any concern for whether you have something worth saying, just put that work in, tiger! True, sticking to a routine helps train the subconscious to be ready to show up at the desk when you do. BUT! But. Routines suck. Am I right folks? And sometimes! Sometimes it’s just not working for you! We tend to get married to a certain system of working; sometimes more seriously than we do our spouses! Heck, if I was as committed to matrimony as I was my shitty writing routine, I wouldn’t be thrice divorced! And maybe I’d’ve actually published something by now. So let that go to show you: don’t be afraid to switcheridoo things up sometimes, you shitfucker! Usually write in the morning? Write at night! Usually write at night? Write at lunch! Usually write at lunch? Write only when the moon is in Scorpio! Don’t write at the coffee shop this week, or do write at the coffee shop! I don’t know what you do. How can I! I’m just a random internet voice! You don’t know me! Why would you take my advice?
Current Events
Since yesterday, amidst a sense of ratcheting intensity, characteristic of a regime who senses its time slipping away yet desperate to make the most of its opportunity, Israel has bombed ambulance convoys, three hospitals, five UN schools being used as shelters, and Al-Azhar University. The total Palestinian dead since Oct 7 is over 7000. That’s an average of about 10 deaths every hour.
Career Development
What do people like from content? No, it’s not to be condescended to by it. No, no, it’s not to feel disdained by a product that clearly thinks very little of their intelligence. NO it’s not a narcotic escape from the pain of self-consciousness! It’s relatability! People love things that are relatable. That’s why they’re always saying things like, “That’s so relatable!” And what’s more relatable to a literary audience than getting a story rejected everywhere it’s submitted? Sharing your successes, and, more likely, failures, with publishing is a great way to pad out your writer’s blog! Plus, it just might happen to motivate you to keep sending that stupid fucking godawful story to another shithole publication no one but the extremely niche internet literary community knows about.
Growing Your Audience
It’s important to make your blog SEO friendly so that it’s reachable by search engine chatgpt israel taylor swift travis kelce matthew perry nfl scores spirit halloween black friday world series college football hamas killers of the flower moon martin scorsese leo dicaprio lily gladstone weather amazon email youtube news facebook walmart translate calculator map wordle mlb nba instagram twitter costco elon musk joe rogan podcast donald trump ukraine zelensky joe biden antony blinken ceasefire free palestine free palestine free palestine free palestine
Literary Theory
Remember manifestos? Well, the correct Italian plural is “manifesti,” but do I look-alike my name issa Giuseppe? Whatever happened to that, huh? Writers should be more annoying in the “this art is going to destroy the suffocating provincialism of bourgeois society” way and less annoying in the….well maybe you should save all the ways writers are annoying for another post.
Writing In Spanish
Es importante cuando al aprender español escribir y hablar en la idioma todos los días. De esta manera, puedes practicar lo que sabes y reconocer las palabras or la gramática que debes repasar. Quizás tu español es malo, y quieres mejorar, o tu español es muy fuerte. Escribir en español en tu blog es una idea gran por razones muy numerosas. ¡Buenas suerte!
Other Art Endeavors
Did you see a movie and think, hey! I want to make movies! Or maybe you remembered how there are a bunch of canvases and oil paints that you haven’t touched in, god, it’s been almost four years now? Having a variety of creative outlets is fantabulous, in no small part because you can blog about them! So if you do decide to learn film production, or bongo drumming, or god knows what else your terrible attention span might latch on to, just be sure to document the process of becoming fascinated by it, then totally losing interest within a week or two, on your blog!
Alienate people by describing masturbation
Well, well, well! Seems like you’ve already done this one!
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