You're reading a post titled “Refresh.” from the archives of Big Contrarian. It was originally published on April 15th, 2008 at 01:17 AM. If you enjoy it, you should subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, or its Twitter page.

Thing is, your writing style isn’t like other traits. It’s not something you develop once, forget about and come back to years later as though it were your childhood bicycle or a talent for solving Rubix cubes. Writing is an exercise. Style is the muscle you build. How you compose a sentence; whether and how often you use commas, adverbs, one-sentence parapraphs; which words you choose and which words you don’t. It’s all a rhythm you can’t just as easily get into as get out of.

I’ve probably started and deleted about eight of these fancy online journals over the last six years. Most of them got snuffed out of time constraints. Get busy enough and it’s hard to justify spending any time at all on anything other than the immediate. Code that, design this, eat at some point, try to sleep, repeat the next day. Anything which doesn’t have to get done just won’t. There is no blog in the entire sphere that has to be done. Probably explains why so many go quiet every damn day. Always something better to do.

Those weren’t wasted bytes. Each deletion taught me something new.

Learn-ed-ed.

My personal life is dull. Best not to share that.

Folks seem to like tutorials and more generally, folks like having other folks figure shit out for them. Easiest way to be widely read is to just solve one heinous problem or another every day and make a post about it. They don’t even have to be interesting problems. Swear to god you can solve the grand ole’ mystery of how to organize a bookshelf according to size and some bastard will email you:

DUGG! I’d been trying to do it by weight and it was getting really hard to maintain.

Such is life on the byte-range. There’s always someone out there in desperate need of common sense.

Technical articles are just like software. Writing them isn’t where you kill yourself. It’s supporting them. I still get the occasional request for help from a Mac OS X hint I posted years ago. Doing one now and again is fun though. Despite the requests, there’s a certain warm-fuzzy you get from helping folks discover something new. Probably do a few of those as the mood strikes.

It’s easiest to write what you know really-really well. Not shit you sort-of-kinda know because you had a conversation with some guy over dinner that actually knew it and picked up a thing or two on the topic and maybe tossed a few feeds into NetNewsWire he recommended. Avoid any topic you would have to cite sources for. I have opinions on economic theory, social justice and the world stage, but I’d fear anyone who took them as gospel. Not saying I’ll never pipe up on the topic, but nothing annoys me more than the slightly-ignorant talking to the slightly-more-ignorant.

Either you’re an editor, an observer, a personality or a pundit. Trying to be all four is too time-consuming. Not knowing which one you are is a waste of resources.

Being an editor is easy. Find new things. Post links to new things. The better you are at finding new things before the next guy, the more readers you’ll have. Not very good at that myself. It requires a certain patience for the backwaters of the web that I just don’t have. Don’t care how interesting the content might be, if the site has links to the person’s self-published book of poetry or links to everyone-will-think-this-as-cute-as-I-do pictures of their cat I’m gonna hit that close button mighty fast.

An observer is easy to pull off too. Just add pithy wit to your links. Trick is you have to possess pithy wit. Not sure I do. Concise sarcasm always strikes me as unfair and pointless. Yes, your joke about how Heston’s gun is now grabbable is oh-so-fucking clever, but dollars to your nuts he could bend you around his wrinkled pinky faster than you can open Twitterific.

Pundits are horrible little creatures. A pundit is an observer with an agenda. He’s not showing you these things to amuse or inform you. He’s showing you these things because they prove he’s right and he wants you to know he’s right and he wants you to agree with him and tell other people that he’s right. A formal type of ego-masterbation best left to folks whose high school experience left them thinking Atlas Shrugged was a better book than it was. Beware the iconoclast; he’s probably an egotistical douche.

Personalities are the most fun to me. Because everyone sort of is one, so it comes naturally. Put your stupid little thoughts down somewhere, and maybe someone will find them as amusing as you do. Same logic the nut-bag street preachers use. Same logic the better writes used. Observe and pontificate, but don’t pretend you’re anything other than one tiny stupid voice in a vast sea of see above. If you’re lucky maybe one post in a hundred will actually be worth reading. If not, maybe some ex-girlfriend of yours will find it a useful way to track how you’re doing these days.

Course, a good personality is entertaining. Not always intentionally funny, but entertaining in some way. Most of the YouTube re-re fame brigade never meant to be brilliant comedians. Just being themselves magic’d the funny on it’s own. Remember to post something you think makes you look bad. Might just be endearing. If not, at least it proves you’re human and not a brand-concious pundit marketing themselves to future employers or looking for a fucking book deal.

Notes to self that you can feel free to ignore.

Never write a book about your blog. Never collect your entries into book form or talk about how you’re thinking about doing it and you’ve been looking into Blurb and wondering if your readers would buy said book and if so how much should it cost. If you ever walk into a new friend’s house and on his coffee table lay a Blurb Blog book, you run out of that house and you mark it with whatever the hobo sign for pretentious asshole is.

Don’t write a blog about marketing. Doing so immediately nominates you for a hell previously reserved for the guys who write books about marketing. You’re even lower on the totem pole since you couldn’t manage a book deal first. Observing particularly good or horrifically bad marketing is just dandy. Shows you’re a damn fine consumer and might just make it after all. Having a universal eight-part theory about what constitutes good or bad marketing is a bit like having a universal eight-part theory about why you are so very awesome. A fun pastime, but only folks who don’t know better are gonna take you seriously.

Don’t pretend like your opinions on the state of whatever industry/topic/event are going to be read by any of the relevant parties. Hell, write everything as if you know and pray they won’t be. Doing otherwise just keeps you confined into that suck-up mentality that ruins all good opinions. If someone’s being a cunt-knuckle, call them out. At least you’ll have someone to avoid at SXSW next year.

Do not go to SXSW unless it is paid for by your employer or you’re going to the music bit. It’s the conference equivalent of the A/V club in high school.

Keep writing. Even if two-thirds of your new subscribers cancel on day two. Those guys were jerks anyway.

The only way to build an audience is to build an audience. Gotten my subscriber count up to over a 1000 on one experiment. Wasted it by not posting for three months and then deleting the domain cause I wasn’t sure it was really, “me”. Like the fucking URL matters anyway. Facepalm.

If you stop posting, folks will stop reading. If you stop posting, don’t post a two-line post about how you’re sorry there haven’t been posts, but you’ve been really busy. Thanks for letting me know. I’d assumed you were dead but your family had kept your blog alive and unchanged out of fear your soul was trapped inside.

Onward.

Right. So personality it is.