Hey everyone! I am back! It’s been a great two weeks of preparation and relaxing. I’m excited to finally be back with a series of 4 stand alone posts before we start the new series with the topic Themes of Writing (or Themes for short). This week’s post, as usual, is about writing but with a slight twist. Instead of being about writing a book it’s about writing something else. So, without further ado….
Why Blogging Is Good For The Fiction Writer
Today I want to talk a little bit about blogging as a fiction writer. It will be a little bit about myself and my experience being a writing blogger. But this blog is all about writing advice so there will definitely be some advice about how to blog as a fiction writer. And as always, these are just my thoughts and opinions. You can always find different kinds of blogs or YouTube channels or others which have different or varied advice about writing.
One thing that inspired me to start this blog, was a writer’s blog much like my own where the writer did a post about blogging just like I’m doing now. In his blog post he talked about the benefits of writing a blog and I was so inspired that I worked out a schedule of my own and began blogging. I have learned a lot in the 5 years since I began writing this blog and while I was absent for most of the year 2019 I actually missed writing this blog and was excited to come back.
When I first began writing this blog, I had the idea that I would mostly be writing this blog for others and not really for myself. I wasn’t a famous author, I didn’t have followers other than my friends and family, and I wasn’t a very experienced writer. I decided when I first began blogging that this blog would mostly be an advice blog with room to develop into something more if I ever became a published author. I saw it more as an assignment to myself that would help me improve my writing and not really as something I would ever really enjoy.
The hardest part at first was coming up with things to write about. If you have ever just browsed my blog you will notice that my early posts where chaotic, of varying lengths, and very confusing. As a young blogger with absolutely no knowledge of blogging I was extremely proud of those posts and I thought they were the most perfect thing I had ever written. Looking back, I can say they are nowhere near perfect but that I am proud in a different way of those posts. I like to think that it shows my dedication to try and continue trying.
Now here is where we get to the advice part of my blog. Writing a blog is not a one size fits all. There are all sorts of different kinds of writing blogs a writer could keep, all sorts of different ways to organize it and all sorts of different ways to update. One of the best things for me about keeping a blog is that I can make my own schedule. I can take a couple weeks break like I just did or even take a couple months because this is my own personal writing blog. I can make a schedule for myself like I’ve doing this year of having set days and posts in a series or I can totally wing it and update whenever I think of something new like I did at the beginning of my blogging life.
Something that I know that definitely helps with blogging, however, is to have your own website for your blog. Obviously, my website is not completely my own, it is still hosted by wix.com and I do not own my own domain name. However, the blog is my own and website is my own without relying on a social media platform (although I do post on those types of platforms).
The benefits to blogging are extensive but here are just a few that I have seen and that I have heard of.
If you are an established and published author keeping a blog can be very helpful for keeping in touch with your audience. Writers are often very busy imagining and writing fictional worlds and our fans are usually busy too. Writing a blog to inform your readers and fans of new updates or interesting life events is helpful for the readers to be able to know what’s going on. Blogs can also be helpful for the writer because readers and fans can reach out to them with questions, ideas, comments, or just praise (which, trust me, more writers need it than you might think they do). It’s a good way to establish a friendly and easy relationship with fans. As a writer who is also an avid reader, I can say that I follow several of my favorite author’s blogs so that I know what is happening in their lives and with the stories they are writing. I love writer’s blogs.
Another good reason to write a blog as a fiction writer is experience. During my inspiration series and my ten writing commandments series I talked in one way or another about gaining experience or experiencing the world. These are all important for becoming a better writer. Writing is a skill. It can also be a hobby but being able to write well enough to be considered by a publisher and be published in the end is a skill. And any skill takes practice.
There are a lot of different things you can do to improve your writing skills but in the end all of those things come down to gaining experience and practicing. I always suggest to young writers that one of the best ways to become a skilled writer and gain good experience is to try writing in all sorts of genres. They don’t have to work out, you don’t even have to enjoy it, but the more genres you try to write the better you will be at writing.
In my opinion, writing a blog is the easiest and most accessible way for young writers to try a new genre without having to worry about perfection in their manuscript. It’s a good way to practice writing non-fiction, opinion pieces, argumentative papers, and social media type posts and content. Blogs are written about a variety of things and a variety of topics. Some blogs are written more like newspapers or magazines and are good practice for writers who want to become journalists. Whatever you think about writing or enjoy writing a blog can be a really good way to test and expand your writing abilities.
For some bloggers, writing is an effective way to tell an interesting story or keep a semi-public journal of day-to-day events. I find a blog useful for helping me to understand writing better. Sometimes I choose a topic for a post or a series that I don’t know much about so that I can learn more things about writing and thereby expand my own skills. Some things I write about are things in writing I feel like I know a great deal about but the feedback I can get from some of my posts about things my readers have heard or learned about that topic that I DIDN’T know can definitely encourage me to learn more about it.
It also helps a lot of writers to practice keeping to deadlines for when they want to someday be published. It teaches good time management the more you come to enjoy and plan for writing your blog. Most of the time you have to set your own schedule, so it also helps teach making a schedule or plan or goal that stretches you without planning too far outside of your capabilities.
All in all, writing a blog can be very useful for writers of all kinds and I highly suggest it for anyone who has been thinking about it, or to those who it had never even occurred to. Writing a blog can be fun, even without a million or more followers. It’s helpful for a writer in a variety of ways and it’s also very enjoyable.
That’s all for this week’s post. Next week’s post will be another stand alone post titled The Best Things About Being A Writer. If you liked this post or any of the other posts on this blog don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me at the social media links below. Also, feel free to let us know what kinds of things you would like me to write about in the future or any questions you have regarding writing, this blog, or me. And remember…
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!
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