Please Stop Telling Me That Bloggers Aren’t Real Writers

Blog writing is as real as it gets and helps a writer develop skills in a variety of areas needed for success

I became peripherally aware of blogging when it first started becoming popular before it really had any reputation associated with it. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was or what it’s purpose was, thinking it was something like a personal column or collection of op-ed pieces that a single writer regularly produced.

This was when I was first exploring writing online. The only writing experience I had at the time was formal academic writing and some dabbling in fiction and poetry. I had no concept of the personal essay, informal post or personal opinion piece. None of that had any place in academic writing as if something wasn’t backed up by recent peer reviewed research or hard data then you left it out.

Shortly after, a close friend of mine became ill and I was called home since we knew it was just a matter of time. He wasn’t giving up without a fight though and what I thought would be weeks turned into half a year during which I was able to spend a lot of quality time with him on a daily basis.

Having little to do in the hours I wasn’t with him, coupled with the need to find a way to process what was happening, I decided to look into blogging which at that point I saw as a kind of online diary, thinking it might help. I checked out every book I could find on the subject and went through them trying to make sense of the writing style.

I started trying to figure out the structure and format while finding the simplest free platform I could. In those days the rules for blogging were few, the main ones being that posts should be short, not more than about 200 words, should be published frequently, preferably daily, and should be organized around a topic and general theme that wasn’t being covered by a lot of other writers.

I soon saw that blogging was not in any way related to what I’d been trained to do in grad school. First of all, there was a bunch of technical stuff that I had to learn, and given that I was a technological idiot this almost put the kibosh on the whole endeavor. I managed to get a very basic blog structure set up on blogger, chose the general area of psychology and mental health (as if this wasn’t an area being covered by anyone else) and composed my first post.

To say that I hadn’t really understood how to compose a well written blog post is a huge understatement. The truth is that blogging appealed to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, I thought that I could just write whatever was on my mind in the informal way you would in a diary, without worrying about structure or organizing it perfectly as you would a formal essay.

The other major reason I liked the idea of blogging was that it was a way to get published quickly and without anyone standing in the way. With academic writing, it took years to see your work in print. First, you had to do all the research and write it up. Because it was sent for peer review to 3 or 4 professionals in the field, it was often four to six months before the editor got back to you. There was often only only a 5 to 10 percent acceptance rate.

Acceptance was generally conditional based on changes that needed to be made, and once resubmitted it could take several more months before hearing back again. If your changes were approved, you waited again for the galley proofs to be sent for you to review and correct. Only then was finally typeset and published in the next issue with space, which may not be for another three to six months.

The idea of writing something up and hitting publish without any additional steps was therefore unbelievably appealing. Obviously, it wasn’t the same kind of writing or type of publication but I foresaw a future where I could publish to my heart’s content, envisioning becoming a popular writer through my efforts.

While I didn’t expect this to happen right away, when I received almost no views or followers after four months I began to question what exactly was going on. There were a number of problems back then that I realized but wasn’t very enthusiastic about correcting.

First, my posts were thousands of words long which no one was going to read. Second, while I wrote about personal topics, I always framed them with some kind of formal content, research or academic theory as I couldn’t quite accept the idea that anyone would want to just read a personal post written by someone they weren’t familiar with. So while my posts weren’t academic pieces, they had a lot of that type of formality in them.

Then there was the inability to really write informally. I had been so well schooled in taking myself completely out of my writing that it was practically impossible for me not to do so. And I admit, I was a bit of a snob when it came to writing. I’d worked hard to master the skills that I had and so didn’t have the highest opinion of anything that seemed “off the cuff”.

This is all just to say that I came to realize that blogging is its own type of writing which isn’t like any other. To do it well takes years of practice and learning new skills and ways of expressing yourself. So while many people criticize this type of writing as amateurish and mostly written by those who are unschooled and unskilled nothing could be further from the truth.

As I began writing more and paying more attention to how writing was evaluated such as in book reviews I noticed that for a number of book authors who were also bloggers, the reviews would say things like, “She’s a blogger, not a writer.” This struck me as rather odd, especially having learned how difficult it was to produce a well written blog post. I wondered who had first decided these two things were mutually exclusive.

While not everything I’ve written in the past couple of years falls under “blogging” or “personal essay,” much of it does. Thinking back over the development of my writing, which is an ongoing process, has made me realize that this type of writing in particular, has taught me a number of invaluable things about the craft.

Blogging has taught me how to write on schedule. Not that I didn’t have to do this when writing academic pieces. Obviously I did. While in school there were due dates that were set in stone for things like your thesis and dissertation and deadlines for journal submissions and for completing requested edits.

But once I began writing full time, I think because I knew that whatever I intended to produce wasn’t academic in nature, I tried to shed whatever formality was associated with that kid of writing. This included the idea of set deadlines.

But once I had committed to writing as more than a hobby, I came to realize the importance of publishing as frequently as possible. I went from posting three times a week to five and then to six or seven sometimes more. This meant that I couldn’t stick to the self-indulgent time frame of waiting for my muse to inspire me. To be honest, most of the time she failed to show up.

Because of my realization that publishing regularly and often was necessary to maintain my audience’s attention and gain new readers, I had to learn how to work through writer’s block when it hit. On a related note, it also helped me learn how to keep writing during difficult times and when my mood was low and all I felt like doing was lay in bed watching Netflix. I admit, I don’t always do these things so well, but I have developed a series of strategies to make it possible to write something even on bad days.

Since I wasn’t formally trained in this kind of writing, another lesson I had to learn was how to experiment with style, tone, rhythm, content type, genre and storytelling to determine what the best combination was for a given piece. Writing on a platform where you can publish whatever you choose has given me the freedom to explore these things and determine what succeeds and what falls flat.

Blogging has also helped me learn strategies to identify what my audience wants to read. Again this is something that I need to continue working on. But I think determining how to discover and address what an audience is interested in instead of always writing about my own inner thoughts without considering if anyone else can relate to them is another important part of being a writer.

Part of this has been the ability to connect with my readers through comments and questions as well as being part of a writing community that provides me with networking opportunities along with suggestions and advice from writers at all different levels. In today’s world, these things are crucial in creating work that resonates with or entertains others, that starts a dialogue, that answers questions readers have or relates experiences that they understand and which touches them.

Most importantly, blogging and the ability to write about a variety of topics and experiences in different genres helped me find my voice. Since we are all multifaceted, this is something that I will continue to develop over time, but blogging has aided me in being able to connect myself to my writing, to be able to put myself into what I create. And while some may argue with this, I think that finding your voice is the most important part of being a writer no matter what type of writing you do.

There’s no arguing that not everything I’ve published is exactly award winning quality. In fact, I have plenty of work you can tear apart if you’d like. As I said, my writing is a work in progress so some of what I’ve published is weaker than I’d like or has simply fallen flat because I took too big of a risk. You can criticise my point of viewpoints, opinions or the conclusions that I reach. I suppose you can even argue the medium that I choose as a platform for publishing my work on determines the worth, or lack thereof, of what I am creating.

But just don’t tell me that because a good deal of what I produce is similar to blog posts, that I’m not a writer. If you aren’t convinced by what I’ve said here that’s fine but please, keep it to yourself. Because I just might argue back that based on everything you need to do to achieve even a small degree of success publishing in this medium, when all is said and done, I am much more a writer than you are.

Natalie Frank has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and often writes about how to create a more satisfying and successful writing life. She is an editor for The Partnered Pen & One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity & Mental Gecko, both of which she created. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found here.

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