Not Dead; Just Sleeping. Ignore the Fangs.

Velcome to my blog. Do close that door behind you, to keep the hated life-bringing sun from penetrating our pleasant gloom.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you may wonder where I’ve been these past several months—and why I’ve suddenly re-emerged, as if from the grave. If you’re new here, you may wonder why my skin is so beautifully pale, my nails so cruelly long. And I have answers to these questions. Draw closer, that I may whisper them in your warm, pulsing ear.

I’ve dispensed a fair amount of writing advice on my blog, but I don’t think I’ve shared with you my best tip yet for blogging productivity:

Do not have a full-time job outside the home.

Simple, right? And I had it down pat. When I was a freelancer, I posted two or three times a week, week in and week out, for months and months and months on end. People said they got a lot out of it, they commented, they shared their own writing, they made fun of me, they completely misunderstood what I was trying to say . . . it was a lot of fun.

But then I got a job, which had a wonderfully clarifying effect on the way I was spending my time. Turns out I was spending more time writing about writing than I was spending on actual creative writing projects. So I decided that blogging was going to have to be put to bed for a while so I could get my sea legs in my new job, focus on my creative writing, and figure out my new life pattern—and determine whether I was going to restart the blog at all.

Well, time has passed, and my job is going great, and my writing is going better than ever (more on that in another post), and I’ve decided the old blog has some life in it yet. Hence the redesign and restart, and somewhat of a reboot, too. I’m not going to have time to post multiple times every single week, but I should be able to post at least once a week. Some posts may be shorter or pithier, and hopefully that won’t be a bad thing. “Brevity is the soul of blogging,” Benjamin Franklin once said, and he was right. I’ll still be talking about creativity and the unconscious, but there may be more of a focus on writing than in the past. I hope I have something useful to offer to a wide variety of readers, but I’ve made my peace with the fact that I’m not an entrepreneur, I’m not a life coach, and I’m not a social media maven. I’m a writer. (And a creature of the night—but that’s another post too.)

So I hope you find something of value here, regardless of whether you consider yourself a writer: something that entertains you, helps you, possibly even moves you. I am on a journey, and I’m writing for those who are on a journey too. These are travel notes—beaches and mountains to seek out, hostels and cities to avoid, humorous misadventures, unexpected treasures.

One more thing: no more Five-Minute Fridays. I release the concept to the Interwebs! Take it, whosoever wishes to, and start your own Five-Minute Friday blog. Start a reality show, sell the movie rights, get rich. You have my blessing. I, however, no longer have time to curate other people’s writing. I’ve got my own little field to plow, and I hope you do too. May good weather bless us all.

Chapter 44: In Which the Wild Mustang Returns to the Corral

Sorry for no blog posts lately! Jeez, you must be feeling all neglected, all low self-esteemy, all questioning your inherent worth and all. And do I ever know how that feels.  Hence all my dysfunctional compensatory behaviors. Speaking of which, where’s that bartender?

Well, until she gets back, let me explain what’s been going on and why I’ve been a bit of an absent blogger. You know how, when you’ve been running your own freelance business for eleven years, you get to a point when you realize that you’re doing okay as a businessperson—but only okay? I mean financially. As in, you’re keeping your mortgage paid, but your retirement plan consists of hoping that Steven Spielberg will option your screenplay for a fat six figures. And you do the math, and you figure out that while you could improve your receivables somewhat, there’s an upper limit to that—and you’re not very far from it.

So you start thinking about going into a new line of business. Like, maybe you could give seminars on how to write the perfect Facebook status update, or you could give a workshop titled “Writing Tweets That Matter.” Or maybe you could set up a lucrative business ghostwriting the memoirs of people’s pets! There’s got to be a lot of money in that niche. But that would require marketing yourself, developing a new set of contacts, trying to get your first client—basically starting all over again.

And you don’t want to start over again. Because you’ve been an editor for seventeen years now, and for better or worse, this is how you earn money in the world. For better or worse, this is the best field for you to plow, even though your little independent farming operation is on the verge of showing diminishing returns. Which means it’s time for a change. A big change.

So then you start looking for jobs. Not desperately, but in a very picky way, because the whole point is to improve your situation, not to make some lateral move that you’ll regret in a year, which you’ve done before and which you’ve seen others do.

And then you finally find a job to apply to, and it’s a big deal because you haven’t applied for a job in years. And you send off your spiffed-up resume and you fill out the online application, and you wait . . . and cobwebs cover the phone, and the crickets are snickering at you behind their wings, and nothing happens.

So you apply for two more jobs. And after you apply for one of them, the cobwebs once again multiply, and now the crickets are openly giggling, and you wonder if it’s just too late­—if you’ve been a freelancer so long that no company would hire you, unless you want to pursue a rewarding career in telemarketing.

But the third job. That one calls you back. That one wants to interview you. And after the interview, the hiring supervisor tells you that you did a great job, and you think he really means it. And then they want your references. And then they make you an offer.

And you accept it.

So you’re thrilled to once again have a regular paycheck, dental insurance, and a retirement plan that does not involve a Hollywood mogul. But part of you is scared, because what about your writing? Have you traded in your creative aspirations for a higher income-tax bracket? Have you sacrificed your art on an altar of business-casual attire and direct-deposit stubs?

No. Because if there’s one thing you’ve learned by this point, it’s that your writing is the golden goose. If you do have some sort of purpose for being here, writing is a fundamental part of it. Not “your” writing, necessarily; just writing, the activity, the artifact, the body of art and culture and work that is writing. You create it, you consume it, you sculpt and polish and improve it. Your clients and employers think you edit for them, to make them happy, and of course that’s part of it; but there’s another part of it that isn’t for anybody—not even for you. It’s for the writing itself, to make it better. It’s as if there’s a secret pact between you and every piece of writing you’ve ever edited, a secret agreement that you and the writing will work together to make the writing excel, just for the sake of excelling. Because excellent writing is a beautiful thing that deserves to exist.

So you’re going to take this job, but when you do, you’re going to take the bus to work, rather than drive; and you’re going to take a small, light laptop computer with you; and you’re going to write every morning and every evening: an hour and a half of dedicated writing time five days a week, which is more than you’ve written on a daily basis in a long time.

And one more thing: before your job starts, you’re going to let your blog readers know why you’ve been absent lately. You’re going to ask them to understand, and you’ll hope they do. You’ll reassure them that once your new routine gets established, you’ll get back to regular blogging. You’ll thank them for reading, and you’ll wish them well.

You know how all that is, right?

Five-Minute Friday: Success

Earlier this week I was going to write a post about good intentions and title it “The Road to Hell,” but I was afraid of the search-engine traffic such a title might generate: a mix of earnest fundamentalists and even more earnest Satanists. Plus, I apparently don’t need to be so ambitious as to write an actual mini-essay on a topic, with, like, a topic sentence and the three paragraphs and all that. I think a regular old Five-Minute Friday is about all I can handle now, blog-wise. And not always even that! As the past few Fridays have demonstrated.

After working so hard to get my freelance business hitting on all four cylinders, it finally is: hitting on all four and running hard to boot. I’ve also been working out more than I ever have, and let me tell you what I’ve learned: there are veins in your arms! No, it’s true. And if you watch your weight and work out and lay off the fried starchy bits, well guess what? You can actually see those veins WITHOUT AN AUTOPSY. Who knew.

Plus I’m revising an old short story of mine from my grad-school days, trying to see if Frankenstein can jolt some life back into the monster and maybe even get it a job at a nice magazine somewhere; and the screenplay is still, as always, “in process.” But that’s a damn sight better than “in suspended animation,” where it languished for a year and change.

All these great things have come about as the result of a life reorganization, sort of like cleaning out your desk and finding stuff you forgot you had. But in that reorganization, one thing got left out: blogging. It’s like my life turned into a game of musical chairs, and the poor old blog was left standing when the music stopped.

How do I fix this? I don’t know. I’m taking a stab at it by just trying to get a Five-Minute Friday post done. Part of the problem with these is that I often have big deadlines on Fridays. Solution? Do it on Thursday, genius. So that’s what I’m doing now.

I’ve written about failure, but I haven’t written about success; and because that’s what I’m suffering from now, I figured it would be a good topic for today’s episode of Five-Minute Friday.

How to succeed at just about everything but blogging:

1. Write for five minutes, using the topic as an initial prompt. Feel free to deviate from the topic, and feel free to write for longer than five minutes, too.

2. Don’t stop to edit. Don’t worry about typos or grammar or even the quality of the writing. Dig deep or skim the surface, but keep those hands moving for five solid minutes.

3. Feel free to send me your piece to be posted. You can post as a comment on this post, or you can send it to me via the Contact Me link on the main page. I’m happy to post your piece anonymously or pseudonymously, if you wish. This thread will be moderated to ensure a criticism-free zone.

Ready? Five minutes. Go!

I think i come from a background where people were afraid of success, where people got attached to their failure, to the stink of lower expectations and lower achievements, where you don’t aspire to much and thus can never disappoint. that’s certainly been true of me at times in the past. sometimes i can’t even fully acknowledge the successes i do get. so writing a post about success seems a little dodgy to that part of me, as if i’m inviting a jinx or falling into hubris. pride goeth before a fall and all that. but i really believe that if you’re convinced you’re a failure, you’ll fail. unfortunately the reverse does not hold true: if you’re convinced you’re a success you won’t automatically succceed. you still have to work at it, get lucky, etc. it’s like you can automatically disqualify yourself, but you can’t automatically qualify yourself. all you get is a shot at the title. and i’m taking my shot. problem is there are so many different titles to try to get: awesome spouse, responsible taxpayer, model citizen, visionary artist, dedicated blogger, superlative editor, successful freelancer … even just typing all that out gives me a tight feeling around my heart. success does breed success, but at what? i’m glad my business is going so well, i’m glad i’m writing so much, i’m glad for what i have to be glad for; but i still have that feeling of groping in the dark for matches or a candle or a key. and not even knowing whether it’s the matches or the candle or the key that i’m supposed to find.

You Must Pay the Rent!

I suppose the real culprit behind my recent drastic reduction in posts is the Internal Revenue Service. My wife and I recently did our taxes, which forced me to take a hard look at how much I made last year and how much I’ve made so far this year. For a freelancer, those are particularly vexed questions, because those numbers tend to fluctuate—a lot. And for me those numbers have been fluctuating at too low a range. I need to work more, bill more, and keep a much closer eye on cash flow. I sound like a businessperson, don’t I? Well, I am one, in the eyes of the IRS—a sole proprietor, technically speaking.

So I’ve been doing lots of freelance work, some writing, and very little blogging. It feels good to get my sole-proprietor house in better order, and it feels even better to watch my financial situation improve right before my eyes. And I haven’t decreased my writing at all, other than the 10 days or so that I took off between projects. I’m hard at work on a new project now and cranking away on it every day, just as I did for the screenplay.

I tell you all this both to explain my decreased blogging and to share what it’s like to continue to progress through the stages of trying forge a creative life amid a host of other obligations. Very few writers earn all their money from writing, and I’m sure that’s true for any other creative pursuit. Jobs, kids, relationships—we’re all being tugged in multiple directions at once. If we want to live creatively, we’re going to have to struggle to make it work, unless we’ve got a wealthy patron on tap (and I am taking applications, if you’re interested in the position). So my ongoing struggle has entered a new phase.

Brief update on the work itself: the screenplay draft is complete but needs revising (especially cutting the length), so my partner on the screenplay is leading that effort. Oddly, I miss the screenplay, like one might miss an out-of-town friend; but I’m also glad not to have it on my desk anymore, as if the friend had stayed with me a bit too long before leaving.

Now I’m revising a short story that I wrote years ago, while I was still in the MFA program at NC State. Much of what I wrote back then should remain undisturbed in the vault of history, where it cannot disturb others; but a few pieces may have some potential, and I’ve exhumed one of them to see whether I can breathe life into it. It’s one of the few full-on sci-fi/fantasy pieces I’ve written as an adult (although I wrote my share of them when I was younger), so it’s fun to re-enter the realm of the genre. I’m revising it with an eye toward publication. I want the story to be in print one day. We’ll see.

And I’ve decided that even if I can’t get any other blogging done during a given week, I can at least do Five-Minute Friday. So I’ll see you Friday!

How to Blog, in a Couple of Hundred Easy Steps

Nine Long Nights reader Kristian Markus, who writes as The Mag Blogger over at Web del Sol, wrote me the other day to ask a question about his personal blog:

“I was wondering if you could direct me to a good website detailing the steps one can take to attract a wider audience. I’ve been using blogspot.com, and have created some nice looking pages, but as far as issues of registration, meta tags, etc., I am a bit confused.”

Well, join the club, mister! When it comes to blogging, I have no idea what I’m doing at least one fourth of the time. For another fourth of the time, I think I know what I’m doing, but I’m dead wrong, as events later prove, to my lasting and perpetually renewed chagrin. So I only really know what I’m doing maybe half the time. Impressive, oui? But if the scanty hill of knowledge pebbles I’ve amassed can help lift you any higher in your own blogging endeavors, then I’m more than happy to share them. And as time goes on, more friends of mine start blogs or express an interest in it, so I figured I would answer your question here, for all the webheads to see. (How about that “knowledge pebbles” metaphor? So concrete, yet so evocative!)

First off, read the other posts in my Blogging category (see link in the right-hand sidebar of the main page). As time goes on and I post more about blogging, that’s where I’ll put the posts.

Next, the best I can do is to point you to the main resources I used when getting this blog up and running. The resource most useful to me was Penelope Trunk’s Guide to Blogging. I think that, at their best, Penelope’s blog posts are among the best on the web. Also, she has 40,000 or so subscribers, so she must be doing something right. Penelope has written quite a bit about blogging: how to start it, how to keep it up, how to do it well. I don’t agree with everything she says on the topic, but that’s likely to be true of any resource one might consult. Thus, caveat emptor with all the advice you find on her site and on any site I direct you to (including this one).

Next, there’s a site called ProBlogger that gives a ton of blogging advice in a How to Blog feature. A lot of that material is oriented toward more commercial blogs, which this blog most definitely is not, but most of their nuts-and-bolts recommendations about how to increase readership should apply to any kind of blog. ProBlogger also has a post titled “10 Techniques for Finding Blog Readers” that gives some great advice. As with Penelope’s posts, I don’t agree with everything the ProBlogger writers have to say, but part of what you have to do as a blogger is figure out what kind of blog you want to have, what its raison d’être is, and sifting through this information will help you make those decisions. As you decide which advice to follow, which to disregard, and which to modify or wait on, you’ll be shaping and focusing your blog—and as I’ve said before, I think a crucial attribute for any blog is focus.

Which brings me to what is likely my number 1 recommendation for blogging: Create engaging content. I get this from a great Washington Post story I read about The Onion. When the Post asked Robert Niles, editor of the Online Journalism Review, why faux news outlets like The Onion are doing so well in an age when traditional newspapers are tanking, Niles responded: “Quite simply, people like The Onion are creating more engaging content than the daily papers are.” Other parts of the puzzle do matter, but none matters more than the creation of engaging content.

There’s more to say about blogging, but I think that’s enough to start with. Click the clicky parts; read, absorb, argue, separate wheat from chaff; and—most important—implement.

The Creative Habit, Part II: Be in Shape

I used to see a guy around town who looked kind of like Wilford Brimley: he had the barrel chest, round glasses, and bushy, graying mustache, although he was less portly than Mr. Brimley, and he had more hair on his head. I often saw him and his wife on my morning runs; I’d be panting down the bike path while they were taking a leisurely stroll. I later talked to him about running (which he’d been forced to give up due to an injury), and he said, “Some people don’t understand that the real challenge is getting out there and doing it on a regular basis.”

That has certainly been the case for me. Over several years, I’ve managed to get to the point where I can run at least three miles in thirty minutes, but I could be doing a lot more than that if I was just regular about my running. So for now, instead of focusing on pace and distance, I’m focusing on three things: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

I think creative people face a similar challenge. Every hour we spend being creative is an hour well spent, but you can get more out of that hour if you do your creative work on a regular basis. Author Rick Bass has written about this; he uses the metaphor of having to bushwhack through tall foliage from your safe, comfortable home to the place in your imagination where the story lies. He says that if you don’t beat that path down every day, the weeds will regrow and obscure the trail, forcing you to work harder just to get back to where you were before.

If that metaphor doesn’t work for you, try this one, from The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp: “Be in shape.”

Just as an athlete performs better if he’s in top shape, ideas will come to you more quickly if you’ve been putting in the time at your chosen craft. If it’s my first day back after a long layoff, I’m prepared to write off a whole week of work; I know much of it will be worthless, but I have to go through that process to get my mind and body back into shape. When my conditioning is right, I can feel productive in two or three minutes. You may already know this. Whatever your medium, if you’ve been away from it for a few weeks, the first days are going to be clumsy and fruitless. But things get easier as the rust falls away. The ideas come more smoothly. The hands on the instrument, the fingers at the keyboard, the eye at the easel respond in sync to the urgings of your mind and heart. You are fit and gleaming. You can’t wait to attack your work.

Don’t you just love those final two sentences? The book is full of vigorous, positive, motivational statements like those. Love it.

Anyway, this idea of beating down the path or being in shape was one of my primary motivations for starting this blog. Blogging isn’t the same as working on my screenplay every day, but it’s writing, and it keeps me at a sort of basic level of writing fitness that makes it easier for me to work on the screenplay when those times come. The relation of writing this blog to writing my screenplay is like the relation between playing scales and playing music, or stretching and running.

Now, full disclosure: I still need to get better about putting time in on the screenplay more regularly, as opposed to working hard for inspired chunks of time. But I’m getting there, and the blog is helping.

So I offer this to you for what it’s worth: Keep your hand in the game. Beat down the path every day. Stay in the conversation. Be in shape.

Why Focus Matters to Your Blog, Part 2: It’s Not All about You (believe it or not)

Welcome to part two of “Blogging Tips from a Neophyte,” which I think is pretty much equivalent to “Sex Advice from a Recently Deflowered Virgin.” Sure, I’ve done the deed; but do I really know what I’m talking about? All I can say in my defense is that I’ve made sixty-plus posts on my blog since I started it five months ago. I suppose that makes this post “Sex Advice from a Recently Deflowered Virgin Who Is Now Promiscuous.” I’m not too sure about the quality, but baby, the quantity is there.

And that’s what we’re actually focusing on today: how to keep making posts, which is the sine qua non of keeping your blog alive. We talked last week about how and why bloggers abandon their blogs, which I think generally boils down to one main problem: the blog isn’t focused enough. The lack of a coherent overarching focus for your blog can make it harder for both you and your readers to sustain interest in the blog over the long term.

A coherently focused blog is one that covers a limited set of interrelated topics. Thus, you focus the blog by limiting the set of blog topics. You must choose what you want the blog to be about. Perhaps you already know what you want to write about: people who wear goth attire in hot weather, for instance, or the theory that the royal family of Britain is a bunch of reptilian humanoid shapeshifters. If you don’t know or aren’t sure what you want your blog to be about—and this was the case for me when I first started thinking about launching a blog—a good way to figure it out is to write some practice posts that are not necessarily intended for publication. (Yet another of my wife’s many excellent ideas.) Write these practice posts as often as you can for a solid month before you even start the blog. Over the course of that month, you should see a pattern emerge. Certain topics or content areas or themes will be repeated or emphasized; others will appear only rarely or in subsidiary roles.

Out of these repeated or emphasized themes, pick two or three themes that meet the following criteria:

* They interest you more than the other themes.

* You write about them more than the other themes.

* You could see having a blog devoted entirely to writing about those themes, and only those themes.

* The themes naturally overlap.

That last bullet point is an important one. What do I mean by natural overlap? The themes should have some sort of natural connection or linkage that does not depend on you or your blog.

Let me use this blog as an example. After I wrote my month’s worth of practice posts, I saw that three dominant themes had emerged from them: writing, creativity, and the unconscious. I also saw that the unconscious fuels creativity; the unconscious can also directly fuel writing; and writing is a form of creativity. Thus, the domains naturally overlap all on their own, with no reference to me or my blog, making them a good set of areas to blog about.

On the other hand, if I were to write a blog about running, watching True Blood, and eating a vegan diet, those domains have no natural overlap that I can think of. The only overlap they can be reasonably be said to have is the fact that I do them all. For those three themes, I’m the only common denominator, which means the blog would really be about me, and we’re back to a life-diary blog; not good for long-term blog longevity (unless you’re an exception; see part 1 for details).

After you’ve selected your two or three dominant blog themes that meet the four criteria above, write a tagline for your blog that encapsulates those themes. A blog’s tagline (if there is one) is usually the line just below the title. Here are some examples:

Nine Long Nights: “Writing, creativity, and the unconscious.” Three clearly defined themes or domains of content.

Work-in-Progress: “Author Leslie Pietrzyk explores the creative process and all things literary.” Two domains of content: “the creative process” and “all things literary.”

Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist: “Advice at the intersection of work and life.” Three domains: “advice,” “work,” and “life.” Penelope’s tagline is so clear that it’s almost a linguistic Venn diagram.

You do not necessarily have to put a tagline on your blog, although you probably should, because taglines are helpful to new readers and search engines. But creating a tagline is extremely helpful to you, the blogger, in focusing your blog’s content.

Once you write your tagline, stick to it. Every single post on your blog should be situated within at least one of your domains, and you should never have a post that’s not in one of your domains. I make sure that every post I put on this blog has something to do with writing, creativity, the unconscious, or any combination of the three.

To see these ideas in practice, imagine that you are a farmer who has decided to take art lessons for a year. You think it might be fun to chronicle the experience, so you decide to start a blog called Chicken Doodle Soup. Your tagline: “A year of farming and art lessons.” Two domains: farming and art lessons. For this blog to be a focused blog, all its posts must be primarily about farming, art lessons, or both. In addition, it should not have posts about trying a new muffin recipe, buying a used car, or going on a cruise. Those are life-diary posts.

If you’re starting, restarting, or thinking about starting a blog, I recommend that you take the time to focus the blog on coherently defined, naturally overlapping topics that strongly interest you. There’s a much better chance that your blog will still be around a year from now if you do.

“You have to focus, Trinity”: Why Focus Matters to Your Blog

Since I launched Nine Long Nights, way back in the winter of ’10, several friends and acquaintances of mine have started, restarted, or talked about starting blogs of their own. I recently heard that one million new blogs are started every month. (Well, I didn’t exactly hear that; it was a statistic displayed on an easel as part of a Blue Man Group show. I’m not sure how authoritative Blue Man Group is as a source of statistical information. Probably a step below Wikipedia.)

For many of us, the appeal of starting a blog is intuitive. We have things we want to say in some sort of public forum, and a blog gives us an easy way to do that. Seems foolproof; but sadly, it’s not. I’ve seen blog after blog founder for lack of posts. A blogger will start out with good intentions and ample enthusiasm, but for whatever reason he or she will lose interest and simply quit adding new posts. I know this has happened to some of my readers, and it’s happened to me, too, when I was an authorized poster on a blog started by someone else a few years ago. I made a grand total of two posts before flaking out.

Why does this happen? There are undoubtedly many reasons, but I suspect that in general, people who abandon their blogs do so for one main reason:

The blog isn’t focused enough.

Lots of people envision their blog as a bully pulpit from which they get to say whatever they want. They’re right, of course; but if that’s all your blog is, you run the risk of losing interest in it somewhere down the road. I think the “say whatever they want” part is where people get into trouble. If your blog merely consists of you writing about whatever random things you feel like writing about on a given day—sort of a life diary—then the only common denominator among all your posts is you. That means that you are the topic of your blog. And the problem with you being the topic of your blog is that you are large, you contain multitudes, as Walt Whitman said. There’s so much in you and constantly passing through you that it can be hard to pick and choose what to write about. People contemplate the enormity of the task, and their minds fuzz over, and they don’t post.

For bloggers like me, who get a big boost from comments and pageviews—concrete indicators that people are reading and responding to your blog—another trap lies in wait. Let’s say you start a life-diary blog, and at first you have no problem sitting down and posting. A month or two later, though, you start to feel discouraged when post after post goes by with no comments. So you go to your dashboard to check on your pageviews, and the line graph depicts a flat plain with the occasional pebble, instead of the mighty Himalayas you were hoping to see. You’re posting, but nobody’s reading. The lack of readers discourages you, and the discouragement kills the blog.

Why aren’t they reading your blog? Again, lack of focus might well be the ultimate reason. From a reader’s standpoint, the lack of a coherently focused blog topic means that a much greater burden is placed on how interesting the blogger is and how good the writing is. People don’t read a life-diary blog because they’re interested in horror movies or literature or shoes. Other than a few loyal friends or relatives, people read a life-diary blog because the blogger has an interesting life, a fascinating personality, or a compelling writing style. But if a blogger lacks one or more of these items, their life-diary blog won’t command many readers, which may cause the blogger to feel very very alone with their blog. And for some of us that alone feeling is a sure-fire motivation killer. (It was for me.)

Let me add a very important caveat here: there are indeed bloggers out there who have successfully kept up life-diary blogs for years and years (see how we almost fly and Dooce are two good examples). In my opinion, these bloggers are exceptions that prove the rule. How do you know if you’re an exception? Start a life-diary blog where you just blog about whatever the hell you want, or not, no real focus, just you writing. Six months later, if you’re still maintaining the blog—meaning that you’re putting up at least one post a week—congratulations! You’re an exception. But if not, come back here and apply the advice in this post.

In my opinion—in my conception of what a blog should be, at its best—creating a really good blog is like creating a really good book, movie, song, painting, or any other creative product: it needs to be about something. (Of course, we can all think of avant-garde stories, movies, etc. that are not really “about” something—Last Year at Marienbad and Naked Lunch come to mind—and avant-garde bloggers should completely disregard this post. The advice I give here is for the rest of us.) The best way to ensure the long-term viability of your blog is to focus the blog on a coherently defined topic.

How do you do that? Tune in next week to find out!