Blogging « Black Marks on Wood Pulp / by Corey Vilhauer

Category: Blogging

Time to stop being lazy

November 7th, 2011

There was a time when I was convinced I was writing for myself and myself only. This blog is an ongoing example of that: a subjectless ramble of personal thoughts, few of which are constructed for anyone but me.

So I just wrote. I didn’t proof. I rarely edited. I threw missives out like candy at a parade, and I watched as some of them slid under the curb. When so many things are tossed out without regard to audience, they tend to be easy to miss. I wondered why people didn’t comment, and I wondered how long I’d be willing to do this, and I ultimately decided it didn’t matter. This blog is for me. I’m the audience. Screw you people.

The real answer: this blog allows me to be lazy.

Quite the opposite of its intention, which was to be my canvas for practicing the art of writing. Just write, damn it. Just keep in practice – a post-a-day calendar for a non-writer looking to break into the business. Truth is, I’m long past that, and while my skills have improved slightly, my work habits have not. I am a lazy writer. I don’t do drafts. I’m a one-take-and-it’s-done guy.

When I write posts for Eating Elephant, I take great care in writing something worth reading. I write for an audience. I don’t have an editor, but I do have an internal scribe yelling at me to be better do better write better just be better aargh. And, now that I’m trying to get something together for the upcoming Contents Magazine, I finding that scribe is yelling even louder, this time backed up by a Real Life Editor Who Offers Suggestions.

(The Real Life Editor is much nicer than the internal voice, thankfully.)

So, yeah. Writing for others? It’s hard.

For nearly seven years, I’ve misunderstand what I was supposed to be practicing with this blog. I wasn’t supposed to write for quantity, but for quality – to develop some kind of writing methodology that could force its way through writer’s block and insecurity and all of the other crap that we as writers deal with every single day. Now, with a deadline looming and an audience waiting, I find myself wishing I’d have been a more focused student.

I really wish I’d have gotten the syllabus in the first place.

Time to learn focus, I guess. Time to stop being lazy.

Comments: 3

Issues Considered: Blogging, Content Strategy, Writing

How I Write

August 24th, 2011

I don’t find a quiet room. I don’t grab a cup of tea. Instead, I cram. I think of an idea, I email it to myself to remember later, and I sit down to write when I have time.

Honestly, I’ve never understood the pains some people go to in order to write. The planning. The organizing. The ritual. I’m sure it’s important, and billions of best sellers prove that it’s working for someone, but it just doesn’t work for me.

There’s no routine, for me. This is how I write.

This Is How I Write

I start with an idea. The idea never comes when I want it to. It comes at a random time, and that’s why a routine doesn’t work.

Usually, I jot the idea down. I email it to myself. Then, I put it on my to-do list. If I don’t put it on my to-do list, the idea might as well have never happened.

Next: when I have time, I write.

That’s all.

I know, right? Because writing is this prickly, amorphous tangle of emotion and fear and all of that.

Truth is, I just write. I just start something. If I finish, I finish. If I don’t, I wait until the next day. The issue isn’t the process – it’s about getting over the blank page, starting to write a few words, and ending up on a roll.

The tools

Today is my first day using a traditional text editor to write a blog post. I’m using BBEdit, and I’ve imported my blog’s stylesheet so I can see how it looks in realtime. My goal is to take it one step further, implementing Gruber’s Markdown syntax to create a simple and effective process toward writing my posts in HTML, making transfer to this blog more logical.

Before this, I was an unabashed Microsoft Word fan. What changed? A need for simplicity, first off, and a need for something that I could transfer from site to site. The copy/paste/format/code routine seemed so archaic, as if I was still trying to start a fire with sparks and leaves while a butane lighter sat just inches away.

I jot ideas into Evernote, but typically I use email to remind myself. My to-do list is Things, which I love, and I sketch more complex ideas into a Moleskin.

I used to use ultra-fine Sharpie pens, but they bleed through my current knock-off Moleskin. So I’ve switched to Energel Liquid Gel Ink pens from Pentel. They’re great.

Why does this matter?

It doesn’t.

Seriously. This does not matter.

This routine is mine. It’s not even a routine. It’s barely a list of actionable steps – it’s more like a random list of unactionable drivel.

I write the way I write and you write the way you write. Creativity. Analysis. Creation of any kind. These are not things that can be summed up in a 15,000-hit eHow page, or on a search marketing blog, or even person to person.

I mentioned this in my methodology post over at Eating Elephant: you create your own system by trying and failing and adapting and trying again. Because what I do will not work for you. What you do will not work for me. All we can do with each other is make suggestions, push each other harder, and remember that nothing creative is done in terms of black and white.

By all means, try my method. Try lots of methods. And take the things that work forward to create your own method.

The ongoing legacy of 9rules

July 20th, 2011

It always strikes me how the most active people from the old 9rules community – and I’m thinking about the community from 2005-2007, when I was a new member and the Triad was still around and everything felt awesome – have all ended up skewing toward what I like to think of as the New Creative Industries: web development and strategy, digital design, digital photography, etc. This from a group that wasn’t necessarily a tech- or web-related bunch: people in 9rules did not blog exclusively about technology, development or digital design at all.

For those who don’t remember, 9rules was a blog community. A pretty great one, for a while. Backed by Scrivs and Tyme and Mike, 9rules collected the best of unrepresented blogs, aggregating content and helping others discover good writing and design. It was an honor to be selected.

I was a late bloomer – I came in on round 5 of acceptances in 2006, a few years before the Triad sold off and the site became a shell – but I remember the thrill in finding like-minded blog nuts, all blogging about random things.

Many of these people I still keep track of. I still follow Kyle Neath and Alex Morse and Scrivs, and I’d consider myself Internet Friends with even more – Nils Geylan and Abi Jones come to mind. Even Deane is a former 9rules alumnus.

There are more. More talented former 9rules bloggers. More still awesome people. I can’t list them all.

And, outside of the 9rules connection, they all have one thing in common: They all work on the web. Or, they are keenly interested in the web. Or they use the web to their advantage.

By collecting high quality blogs, was 9rules also – in some way – collecting a new generation of curators and web creatives and future people of note? Was I lucky enough to be included in something larger than I even realize – larger than the site itself was even able to realize?

Was the underlying theme of 9rules this sense of discovery? That people who were willing to stay current and keep posting content and be vigilant about quality were already pre-determined to forge forward into the increasingly stable and viable web world?

Did we all become web professionals because we were in 9rules? Or did 9rules work because we were all deeply interested in creating great things for the web?

Or is just a blatantly obvious connection that I’ve been too dull to notice until recently?

Comments: 5

Issues Considered: Blogging, Web

Top Six Things

May 31st, 2011

My Top Six Things from Top Six Things, a list of lists by Clinton Forry:

Only two months old and I’m already excited for the book deal.

Eating Elephant

May 24th, 2011

Hey, you guys. Remember back in November when I said I was starting a content strategy blog and that I was pretty excited about it?

Well, I started a content strategy blog. And I’m pretty excited about it.

What are you waiting for? Go visit Eating Elephant. And learn about content strategy, you nerd.

Comments: 1

Issues Considered: Blogging, Career, Content Strategy, Eating Elephant, Meta

Striking out, looking

May 23rd, 2011

A blog is measured by its productivity. Or, it’s measured by its quality. It’s measured by different things by different people in different situations, and those different factors lead to different differences. No one knows what a successful blog is, outside of “this blog makes me money, dawg.”

So you make it up. And that’s okay, because this is blogging, people. This is ego massaging. This is free-form writing, and there aren’t many rules, and if you think there are then you’re probably doing it wrong.

But sometimes, we get stuck looking for rules.

Which is why this is the first blog post on Black Marks on Wood Pulp in two weeks. (Official meta note: that’s the longest stretch without content the site has seen since not being a site at all.)

Why? Dunno. It’s 100% mental.

Because I read a lot of blog posts from a lot of people who are very good at writing blog posts, and a constant stream of great blog posts gives the illusion that every post is perfect and that I need to pick up my game.

Instead of getting hits when I can, I’ve been aiming for home runs. I’ve been waiting for the perfect pitch. I’ve been striking out looking.

I’ve tricked myself into thinking that there’s this one blog out there that posts something brilliant every day. Nope. Not true.

Instead, there’s thousands of blogs out there that, as a collective, through sheer numbers, post one or two great things each day. And fail. Hundreds of times each day.

Fail? Nah. That’s not right at all. They simply don’t resonate as far as those great ones. But they’re still there, and they’ve still done something, and that consistency of hits goes a long way toward making the home runs worth something.

In other words: sorry I’ve been gone. Crisis averted, I guess.

Comments: 2

Issues Considered: Blogging, Meta

Free Darko closes

April 12th, 2011

Through two books, hundreds of posts, a unwavering belief in what makes basketball beautiful and an undying devotion to the 2006-07 Warriors, Free Darko dissected the finer points of the game through complication and loftiness.

Free Darko Shirt Yesterday, they closed the doors.

It’s a sad day for basketball blogs, yes. But there’s also freedom. As the partners continue doing what they do, we’ll look at Free Darko as a starting point. Chitwood & Hobbs puts it best:

When I think of the end of FreeDarko I find parallels with the punk band Operation Ivy.

…

Operation Ivy was a punk-ska band that existed between 1987 and 1989. In those two years Op Ivy performed 185 shows and recorded 32 songs. They went on a national tour, began booking larger venues, and felt pressure to sign with a major label — instead they broke up. They flamed out.

…

The good news is that the idea of Op Ivy didn’t die with the band. They were arguably even more successful after they broke up. Their only studio album, Energy, has sold more than 500,000 copies and the iconic band has been credited with the 1990’s punk revival in California. They are a worldwide cult success. Tim Armstrong parlayed Op Ivy’s success with Rancid, the Hellcat Records label, and a lucrative song writing profession for artists such as Pink and Gwen Stefani.

The posts. The art. The random references I never understood. At least I’ll always have the books.