Writing Blogs is not Algebra

Writing blogs is a craft that should be honed until each blog is a work of art worthy to be framed and hung on the wall.

Blogs should be precisely-cut diamonds, polished to perfection. Writing blogs is an exercise in ‘good’ writing. Like satisfying sex, blogs can’t be rushed. A rushed, careless blog is like premature ejaculation.

To succeed as a blogger, every blog must be desirable. As a beautiful woman – or man – attracts a second glance, a really good blog should be written to be shared and read again like a novel by Gabriel García Márquez.

Sometimes it takes a week on my daily walks in Battersea Park to think out a blog, another to write it. When the stars are in alignment, blogs emerge from the universe and I reach up and take the gift. At others, I don the costume of an archeologist finding the bones of a Neanderthal skeleton that I painstakingly put together, each word dragged from my gut like teeth from my mouth.

Writing Blogs Recipes

The best blogs are like cake. The first bite hits you with a sugary burst of adrenaline. The middle is a layer of mind food, soul food, an intellectual and psychological feast leaving a few crumbs of wisdom on the plate to pick at and savour. 

If you write blogs about yourself, you must yourself be interesting in order to interest your reader. Blogs that begin: I really couldn’t get it together today until I’d had my second coffee and then I got a call from my sister who’s always going on about her bad elbow… No one cares. A blog that begins: I got a bullet sent to me in the post today – now we want to know what happens next.

If you are writing a cookery blog, find a new spice and mix it with a little-known vegetable and cook it using a magnifying glass on a global-warmed day in high summer. Search for the new, the unknown, the unique. Be abstract, tangental, absurd. Walk the plank, dive into the depths of your subconscious and haul up a chest of Spanish doubloons.

Go to Google and seek out the two million blogs about writing blogs. Study the SEO (search engine optimisation) advice on pleasing the algorithms to drive your blog up up the charts.

Then take a cold shower and forget it all. 

Robots lack taste and writing blogs is not algebra. There is no x to be found. No formula. Follow too much advice and what you end up with is not an original blog, but a painting by numbers. Blogs provide writers the opportunity to shape and sharpen their prose before taking their talent to more useful pieces of writing than writing blogs.

While you’re here:

Writing blogs, short stories and scripts for short films is fully explored in Making Short Films: The Complete Guide from Script to Screen. 

“Nobody should think about making a short film without reading this first. Thurlow takes new filmmakers through the steps of writing and shooting film in a way that will save time and money. Plus it’s a good read!” – Producer Jennifer Fate Velaise, Fate Productions, Los Angeles.

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