Dans ses écrits, un sage Italien
Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.-Voltaire
Here we are in the last week of Blaugust and the topic of the week is about staying motivated.
To write a single blog post is pretty easy. We all have something to say, some opinion to share, something to complain about, or some entertaining tale of challenge, victory, defeat, or shame. It probably isn’t a chore to get to maybe half a dozen posts. The world is, as I noted a couple weeks back, full of topics if you look closely enough.
But at some point the white hot rage or whatever drove you to start a blog will diminish. You will have said the things that were on your mind at the beginning and will have to face the fact that if you want to keep writing you will need both a source of topics and the motivation to keep going.
If you are happy with what you have written, if people are reading, if you’re getting comments that turn into thoughtful discussions or interesting counter-points to your posts, it will be easier to carry on. Attention is a powerful motivator.
But what if you post your well crafted opus on the evolution of housing options in Runes of Magic and nobody responds?
There was a time about a decade back when you could reliably count on somebody showing up for a comment if you had managed to pass what seems now like a fairly low bar of notoriety. The stats that WP.com shows me say that there was a stretch when I could count on an average of 8 comments per post. Even with some percentage of those being my own responses in comments, that is a lot of discussion going on.
As SynCaine pointed out in my July month in review post, there was a link to a reference to a fairly simple post he did back in 2009 that ended up with 40 comments. That was the golden age, where a rant or a controversial opinion might get your comments to overflow.
But now a days the threshold for getting comments has risen quite a bit. The advent of other social media channels like Twitter and Reddit, and other gamer outlets like Twitch, not to mention the whims of Google, has made blogs much more of a niche than they were. Comments per post here, which peaked at 9 a decade back, are a lot closer to 3 these days. And if it wasn’t for Bhagpuss that number would probably have sunk to around 2.
What do you do now?
Well, first, go leave a comment on another blog. They’ll appreciate it. And, if they don’t, you know not to bother going forward. There are still plenty of fish in that sea.
But after that, you probably need to evaluate why you were blogging in the first place and work towards that as a goal.
If you started blogging in order to get traffic and comments and whatever, you can still do that. It is more difficult than it was a decade back, but you can still swing it. You can work on your SEO, you can promote your blog on a wide range of social networks, and you can tackle controversial topics or take radical stances on more mundane things. You can get attention. Whether that attention will make you happy is your call.
Or maybe you set out simply to craft a gold plated edifice of perfect text that you expect to stand the test of time and and serve as a shining beacon to future generations. You might manage that with a few more revisions of that post that has been sitting in your drafts folder for two years already.
My own motivation is much more mundane; just to remember.
Even if you have your writing goals nailed down and you can think up topics left and right, there can still be times when motivation lacks. Do I want to write about another move op or quest run or achievement? Sometimes the words just won’t come, or dribble out half halfheartedly. It is around then that I feel like I need to prime the pump. The one thing that seems to get me writing is to be writing already. So I have a series of regular posts I do, or events that I will write about, which I can fall back on. I mentioned a few in my prep week post.
Probably the most common on here at TAGN is the month in review post. I have managed to do one on the last day of the month, every month, since I started the blog. But I don’t have to write it on that day. It has a standard format and, save for a couple of entries that require the end of the month, I can start writing it any time. I often start writing these posts weeks in advance when I have some time to write but don’t feel I have something to write about. Doing the 1/5/10 years ago section often sparks ideas and leads me off to some topic about which to write.
Another post type I find I can get running with are Quote of the Day posts. Somebody is always saying something. Take their quote and run with it. And then there are “Summer Re-Runs” posts, where I lump together a series of posts on a specific topic that bring together a story or a bit of history.
There are some other regular posts, like a look at the EVE Online Monthly Economic Report and the SuperData Research digital video game revenue chart. EVE Online also releases a patch/feature update most months, which is an easy item to write about.
And then there are the items that trigger posts for me, things like announcements, patch notes, expansions, and the sort of headline news items that come around once in a while. There are times when I get in almost a reactionary style of writing, where these sorts of bits that I feel I ought to write about start showing up all of a sudden and I am just writing about them. The blog starts to feel like a news site as I try to cover these sorts of things. But I am not about news, but about context, the idea that all sorts of things are going on even if I am only playing EVE Online or WoW in a given week.
Of course, the problem with standard posts is that they can start to feel routine. If they get stale then they are less likely to spur you to write other things. Sometimes you have to shake things up in order to find a new balance that can keep you going. For example, for the EVE Online MER I kept reporting on the same charts for over a year. When that got stale, I decided to find something specific to focus on each month, something related to events in the game to see what influence they had.
And then there was the weekly Fantasy Movie League posts, which grew to be immense, 2,000 word ventures each week. That started to feel like a burden. So I looked at what was the most interesting bits and focused on that… for me it is probably the look at the new movies that show up each week… and cut other parts back to no more than what was probably really needed.
But all of those together, the regular posts and the fall back options, give me just enough structure that I seem to be able to build up a week’s worth of posts, one week after another, until another year has gone by. And then they find their way into the Month in Review post where I look at them and often find inspiration from them yet again.
Or I suppose you could just to what WordPress.com sent me this morning about writing more.
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