There's two kinds of blogs I write. Quick thought or deep dives.
For 'quick thoughts' the process I put myself into is 'write an email to a colleague' on the topic. If I can't write a draft in 30-60 mins, it's something I abandon it and don't stress about abandoning it. Maybe it'll change my thinking and still be a useful exercise.
For 'deep dives' this is closer to short book chapter. I start a Google Doc and chip away at it a bit at a time, get editor input, and end up chopping it in half 2-3 times! :)
I journal every night. And sometimes this is the stuff of proto blog posts. Mostly it's personal. But I do often get ideas from what I write.
On motivation,
Honestly my motivation comes from the love of coding & technology. If something lights me on fire, and really makes me excited, I feel like I really need to share. You can't hold me back!
Writing feels fairly natural to me. Like writing code. I can just jump into a project and start editing it and picking it up. Much like writing code, I often either get into 'refactoring' mode where I'm editing what I wrote previously. Or I start continuing on what I'm writing. It doesn't take much to start seeing what's wrong and start contributing...
Sorry, I don't have a lot of insight here. I have been writing a lot for a long time, and having a liberal arts background, they grill you to write, write, write!
On planning,
I find writers fall in a spectrum of gestalt, 'start writing' and let the structure fall out of the writing. Or on the other hand, people that outline down to the sentence level. I tend to be in the former, more gestalt category.
On editing,
For personal blogs, I have a group of friends that review each other's posts and offer suggestions. Usually not at the copy-editing level, but more at the conceptual level...
For company blogs, we have a PR firm that can help edit and offer suggestions for different 'personas' in our corporatists blog audience. I also have colleagues edit.
I regularly dark-launch my blog articles, share with close friends, and they point out my glaring typos, etc that evaded all editing.
On a 'regular habit',
I got a liberal arts degree (history!). Imagine instead of coding projects, you had writing projects. You had to write persuasively with lots of deadlines. My interest in history since high school really drove a lot of writing.
The best course I had was a senior touchpoint where we had to write our opinions on a single page. Very challenging experience to persuasively make your point in one page! We would workshop these and share them in a close group, and give good feedback.
I also found a supportive environment of peers at work that encourage writing
For 'quick thoughts' the process I put myself into is 'write an email to a colleague' on the topic. If I can't write a draft in 30-60 mins, it's something I abandon it and don't stress about abandoning it. Maybe it'll change my thinking and still be a useful exercise.
For 'deep dives' this is closer to short book chapter. I start a Google Doc and chip away at it a bit at a time, get editor input, and end up chopping it in half 2-3 times! :)
I journal every night. And sometimes this is the stuff of proto blog posts. Mostly it's personal. But I do often get ideas from what I write.
On motivation,
Honestly my motivation comes from the love of coding & technology. If something lights me on fire, and really makes me excited, I feel like I really need to share. You can't hold me back!
Writing feels fairly natural to me. Like writing code. I can just jump into a project and start editing it and picking it up. Much like writing code, I often either get into 'refactoring' mode where I'm editing what I wrote previously. Or I start continuing on what I'm writing. It doesn't take much to start seeing what's wrong and start contributing...
Sorry, I don't have a lot of insight here. I have been writing a lot for a long time, and having a liberal arts background, they grill you to write, write, write!
On planning,
I find writers fall in a spectrum of gestalt, 'start writing' and let the structure fall out of the writing. Or on the other hand, people that outline down to the sentence level. I tend to be in the former, more gestalt category.
On editing,
For personal blogs, I have a group of friends that review each other's posts and offer suggestions. Usually not at the copy-editing level, but more at the conceptual level...
For company blogs, we have a PR firm that can help edit and offer suggestions for different 'personas' in our corporatists blog audience. I also have colleagues edit.
I regularly dark-launch my blog articles, share with close friends, and they point out my glaring typos, etc that evaded all editing.
On a 'regular habit',
I got a liberal arts degree (history!). Imagine instead of coding projects, you had writing projects. You had to write persuasively with lots of deadlines. My interest in history since high school really drove a lot of writing.
The best course I had was a senior touchpoint where we had to write our opinions on a single page. Very challenging experience to persuasively make your point in one page! We would workshop these and share them in a close group, and give good feedback.
I also found a supportive environment of peers at work that encourage writing