Ideas Are Life
07/27/2012The curse of living on an island is that it makes it easy to place limitations on ourselves. We have to worry that something said or done will insult the feelings of a distant relative or a friend of a friend. If you have an idea, these same people literally come out of the woodwork to give advice. Sometimes, I see the island mentality and think that it is impossible to overcome or that there’s no way to make a positive impact on set attitudes. These statements (based on personal experience) are rational but they are also statements that can be overcome.
I was taking part in a little self-pity the other day when this problem of island life popped into my head. I’ve been blogging steadily now for a few months and wondering why I had no more readers than when I started. The easy answer is that I live on an island and it’s hard to reach out to a wider audience because there isn’t much interaction with people outside my small circle of friends. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was just a rationalization. As with any situation, there are good points and bad options. The secret is to maximize the good and minimize the bad. This might seem obvious but, when you’re in a little slump, the obvious is rarely self-evident!
So I sat down and made a list of the good and bad things about island living. In my list, I tried to be honest about what were my failings and what as due to my environment. As I mentioned above, readership can’t be blamed on where I am because my writing isn’t specific to where I live and I intentionally try to use broad themes that can apply to people everywhere. The next step was a review of past posts to see if they sucked. This obviously isn’t the time for false modesty so, in re-reading them, I was confident that they said what I meant and were in a style that I was comfortable with.
I’d had a conversation with a friend about my posts and he suggested that I was too bland. In my re-reading, I did notice that I do have a casual style of writing but I certainly don’t feel it’s bland. I’m topical, I put as much of myself into the writing as possible, and I try to be humorous. I was pretty sure that the themes I chose were engaging until my last post on the Aurora shooting. The number of readers suddenly increased and there were comments being posted. From those comments, I realized that nothing galvanizes resolve more than a divisive issue like guns. What I also realized was that people tend to read with a pre-conceived agenda in their head.
If my post had contained nothing more that one sentence saying, “I’m in favor of taking away guns from everyone in the U.S.”, I couldn’t have gotten a more visceral reaction. Of course, if you had read all the words, you wouldn’t have found that nor the theme in my writing. I had found a way to increase readership but it wasn’t a method that I liked.
For me, ideas and their exposition are life. When I see or read about things that enrich or shortchange the tapestry of our lives, I want to write about them. I want to describe the situation and explain how it affects me. If the ideas are engaging to others, readers will return. In the context of my problems with living on an island, I also find that the smaller audience provides an incubator of sorts where I can talk about issues that face our island and maybe more directly affect the audience
As for the concept that more readers somehow implies that my writing is better, I reject that notion. For all of you who do read regularly, I hope you do come back. And, if you do or don’t agree with something I’ve said, please post a comment. If you really like it, please share the link.
So That's Life? 
Hmm, interesting read. You need to sign your blog so people can find more of your writings, maybe to increase your readership. Hope you have an awesome weekend.
Thanks. I updated the contact information to include my name and email address.
Hi avharris — I don’t think your writing style is bland. I tried blogging before but I found that unless I focused on a specific topic for the blog or “branded” myself in a way that people “get it” (entertainment, informational, etc), it’s hard to build a reader-base.
I also think that people need to know more about who you are or about what you stand for in your blog. Personally, I don’t really like people knowing who I am so that is why I stopped blogging.
How about instead of writing to a general audience out there, write to your circle or a specific group of people that you know. For me, unless I’m researching a specific topic, it’s always more interesting to read about something if it’s written by someone I know who has something to say.
Hope this helps. Have a great weekend!
Thanks Jon, that is really helpful. I don’t mind if people know who is writing. Initially, I was trying to brand myself by using the same name for both the blog and Twitter. That obviously didn’t work so well because I don’t use Twitter much these days.
Wide readership really isn’t my goal. I like writing about things that I see or hear. If you folks enjoy it, that’s good enough for me!
Thanks Art! I just wanted to add more clarification by what I had meant by “branding”. It’s a word, concept, lifestyle or point of view that you want readers to associate with your blog. For example… Todd’s Mobileviews, I associate with mobile devices. His Comicviews blog I associate with obviously comics. There are blogs specific to entertainment videos, funny photos, tech, music, personal finance, religion, politics, etc.
There are more general blogs that are not topical but may be representative of a point of view or interests of a certain population demographic or readership.
I think personal blogs can get harder to brand because it is about you and our POVs change as we learn new things or are at different stages in life.
I think a good way to think about a blog is what you would call it if you were going to publish a magazine.
Would it be called the Honolulu Living Magazine? Would it be called the Music lover magazine? Would it be called the Hawaii politics pundit magazine? Would it be called Short stories in Hawaii magazine? Would it be called the Art magazine? (kind of misleading) Would it be the AVH magazine?
The blog would could be more general but it would have to be clear what POV it is written in or where you are coming from.
That’s a lot of clarification! Wow!
I’m going to need to take some time to consider what you’ve just said. I agree that the branding you’re talking about is very important and I should definitely think about renaming the blog.
As for more focus… you’re asking that from someone with a 13-year-old’s attention span! OK, maybe I’m 15 but I take the point and will see if maybe I can develop a more continuous stream of though from post to post.
Thanks again for the valuable input. Just and FYI, I got a lot more hits from this last post. I’m also thinking that I need to include the word “new” in my FB and Twitter announcements to catch the viewer’s eye. Seems to have worked this time.
Continue to be “authentic” and true to your beliefs, the rest wil follow.