racoma.netI love to write. I write to live. I live to love.

photo credit: Axel Bührmann

Perhaps at one time or another you’ve come across blog posts or articles about how to succeed in blogging. One common advice that people who have met success in blogging would give you is probably this: that you should write, write and write. True enough, successful blogging entails consistency. If you don’t start getting noticed, and if you don’t keep your target audience happy, then your blog will most likely wallow in obscurity.

But, then, I find that there is a flaw in this reasoning, for one cannot just write, write, write. What would you write about? What would you say? What would you communicate?

One trap that inexperienced bloggers often fall into is writing just for the sake of it. Here’s where the advice to just write, write and write meets a dead end. If you focus on just writing, with the aim of making sense of it all somewhere along the way, you tend to lose track of why you write. You lose the essence of writing. You get lost in the words, and they don’t have meaning anymore. Writing becomes mechanical, and it becomes tedious. It becomes forced.

You will start to hate writing. And this will make for very bad output.

Yes, the best writers out there take time to write. They spend hours on end drafting a manuscript, polishing it, seeking critique and criticism, and then finally publishing their masterpiece for the world to see. But they do not write their whole lives. To me, the best authors are those who have truly experienced the world, or at least the subject that they write about. If you’ve been immersed in a certain world, and have truly enjoyed what it means to be in that particular environment, then this would result in a better appreciation of the subject at hand. You get better insights. You get better opinions.

It’s like writing about riding a bike. If you just write, write, write about riding a bike, without truly having ridden a bike, or at least having truly enjoyed the experience, you would probably write that riding a bike can be fun and fast.

However, if you’re an avid cyclist, and you’ve experienced the thrill of going downhill at top speed, and skidding to a turning stop just before hitting that big boulder, you could write better. Like flying, I can feel the sting of the wind on my face. The hairs on my arm stand straight as the rush of driving downhill warms my blood. Even in the confines of my stuffy helmet, I feel free as a bird.

Experience is the best teacher, they say. That’s why most of the time, I would listen to someone who has had a PhD from the School of Hard Knocks rather than someone who has fancy academic degrees. Better if one has both, though!

Don’t just stay cooped up in front of your computer screen. Go see the world. And then write about it!