How to Make Writing Your Blog Posts Effortless

Posted February 1st, 2010 / By James Chartrand in Special Features, Writing

Beginning bloggers have a common problem: their writing isn’t up to snuff yet. That’s no surprise; blogging is new to them, and any new skill takes time to learn.

Now, most bloggers respond to the problem of being a beginner in one of three ways:

Beginning bloggers who ignore their mistakes

This is the most common response to being a beginner and learning a skill. The web is full of abandoned blogs created by people who never figured out why they weren’t getting readers.

The simplest answer? Those blog owners weren’t getting any better at the practice of writing. Poor writing means an inadequate blog, which in turn means no readership and no popularity. I can’t say I recommend this option.

Beginning bloggers who fret about their mistakes

When you’re a beginner at any skill at all, you are bound to make mistakes. There’s absolutely no way of avoiding that.

Unless – and this is a trap a lot of bloggers fall into – you check and double-check every single word to make sure it’s absolutely perfect. Some new bloggers wind up spending several hours on each blog post, trying to make sure every word is spelled properly, every grammatical rule has been met and every punctuation mark is correct.

These bloggers have good intentions, but they’re missing the point: you’re not trying to avoid mistakes when you’re starting so much as you’re trying to get to the point where you can write without making any at all. And that brings us to our third category of people.

Beginning bloggers who learn to be better writers

“Wait!” you say. “We were talking about mistakes and how to avoid them!”

That’s right, we were. If you look at the websites of professional bloggers you admire, I guarantee you that almost none of them are fretting about doing it wrong. None of them are worried about making mistakes. Not even typos.

That’s because they know they’re good writers, and the very idea that they might make a mistake is no longer keeping them from producing excellent content.

So you accidentally left one of the letters out of a long word? So what! The article is sound, it’s well-written, and it’s enjoyable to read. When you find that typo, you’ll fix it. Meanwhile, your blog is still producing great content.

What’s the lesson here?

When you’re a beginning blogger, the key to success isn’t avoiding mistakes. The key is becoming a better overall writer so that mistakes are a completely irrelevant issue. And how do you become a better writer? The simple answer is, of course, to write. A lot.

Of course, when you’re writing your post and you want it to be good, it’s not exactly comforting to think that you’ll only be writing well by the 20^th post and that it’ll take that long to reach excellent quality. You want this post to be good, the one you’re writing right now.

The reason people say you have to write a lot in order to write well is that it usually takes about fifty pages’ worth of awkward, choppy writing to get to writing that flows out seamlessly. The more you write, the easier you want to make the writing process on yourself. You’ll learn to avoid mistakes that you commonly make and naturally shape a certain storyline every single time.

Writing becomes effortless the more you practice it.

So what do you do about those first posts? Write them. And rewrite them. And rewrite them again. And, yes, again.

If you’re brand new to writing, I highly recommend you write and rewrite a post at least – and this is going to sound like a shocking number – 10 times. From start to finish.

Bear in mind I didn’t say “edit” them. Don’t go through and just change a word here or tweak a sentence there. You pull up a new document and you start writing the whole post all over again.

Rewriting completely helps you organize your thoughts better. You’ll start to put your points in the most logical order because that’s how you remember them. One flows into the next. The more you make the argument, the more coherent the argument becomes.

Ditto for writing style. As you rewrite your posts, your style will become more eloquent, more enjoyable to read, because you’ll only remember the phrases that stood out in your head the first time. Every time you write the post over again, it retains all the best parts of the previous post, as well as any new bits of good writing you can summon up this time.

Your tenth draft will be an amalgam of all the good writing you managed over those 10 pages. And that tenth draft will be really good. Enough to be a final post you can publish with pride.

Yes, rewriting is a method that takes a long time. But it does make you a better writer. Which is what you wanted, right?

James Chartrand is the Top Ten Blog pro writing great articles that teach you everything he knows about blogging. Check out his work over at Men with Pens, or be risqué and grab the Men with Pens RSS feed.