Exchange of Realities

I’ve often been asked how it is that I manage to keep going and going and going within the blog topic I have. It’s a pretty complicated answer, but useful to the average blogger, so I’ll take a stab at it.

One of the most important tricks I’ve used is setting a regular deadline and adhering to it. I hang a lot of pride on being able to put out one post a day, every day, and having a time by which I ‘need’ to have it done keeps me from procrastinating (and the guilt if I miss the standard update time ensures that I will post something by the end of that day).

Another is having the mindset to let just about anything trigger ideas. For me, a lot of this comes from a willingness to associate anything with anything; I’ve gotten world ideas from job training and plot ideas from the job itself, let parts of the game I’ve planned inspire article topics and pulled a few more out of meetings with my friends or my coworkers. Heck, two of my posts were inspired by malfunctioning plumbing . I’m not sure how to explain how to cultivate the mindset—the closest I can come is saying that it boils down to being able to ask “How might this be relevant to my work?” every time you run into something, and not give up until you know for sure that there’s nothing there. Remember to make sure you have something to jot the ideas down on; there’s nothing more annoying than coming up with a really good topic but forgetting it by the time you can do something about it.

A lot of people can’t always force articles. There’s an excellent answer to that, though—when you’ve got momentum going, take it as long as possible. I tend to try to plan for as broad topics as possible, then just keep writing and writing and writing until I run out of steam. For many people, it’s tempting to post the result of a braindump like that all at once, but I find it better not to. After all, most blogging experts will tell you that 500 to 700 words is optimal for most people’s attention spans. But more importantly, if you’ve got something that could reasonably be several shorter articles rather than one longer one, why not divide it up? I did something like that when writing about failure—I basically started what was going to be the original follow-up to “Why Heroes Should Fail”, found that I was getting several paragraphs out of dice failure (and that I could make alignment analogies, so I filed that away for later), and basically just took the same approach to player-side failure and plot-necessary failure, then wrapped it all up with how to make a GM-mandated failure tolerable. Came out to about five pages in my spidery handwriting, no breaks between them, and when I typed up the articles I fleshed out the alignment analogy, then broke my long riff down by section and added an introduction and a conclusion to each. One day’s transit worth of writing. One week worth of posts.

Similarly, if an article insists on going in a direction you weren’t expecting, let it. Why try to move against your inspirational flows when you can coast with them?

While I can’t guarantee that these tricks will get you to precisely the posting schedule you want, they should come pretty close. Good luck!