Sunday, April 03, 2011

Frequent Blog Tag: "Writing"

After early last month doing a post about blog tags used, I a few weeks back posted "Frequent Blog Tags: "Customer Service", "Social Media" & "Work" to highlight the more "about or pertaining to business" topics often written about and tagged here. Looking further at this concept of things frequently posted on... another process/topic tag oft used here is "Writing".

Out of these 15 posts I've done with this a tag, three different categories seem to emerge as "the point of what I've getting at" with this tag (categorization of these not a scientific process, but little on this blog is):

Posts about the writing process - Included is this category is both my own ramblings and those of some of my favorite writers (i.e. Chris Jones, Joe Posnanski, Eric Weiner, Roger Ebert, J.R. Moehringer). Not coincidentally, many of these guys have blogs or twitter accounts that give them an avenue to "write about writing".

Posts about words and how great they can be - This is after all the point of this blog (see: blog heading just below the title) and often times the aforementioned writers get into words and their import at the same time they write about putting them down on a page. Also included are my own ruminations (it is my blog, after all) on what words placed together into meaningful order can do.

Posts about writing as an end in itself / career - A two part concept... with one being the act of writing getting accomplished and the other actually getting paid for it. Wisdom I've gathered (and linked to) is that to become a writer as an end in itself, you just... you know, write. This act done and then repeatedly done again more than anything else is a writer someone makes.

Now, if only things were as clear cut around how to then go from being a writer putting words on page for it's own sake to one doing it for a living. That said, those people putting in the effort to write, but who haven't yet made it a career should take heart. Without first "writing for the sake of writing", the making it a career part wouldn't stand a chance (not to mention you wouldn't have the writing for writing's sake thing).

Small victories... one at a time.