Hone Your Writing Craft through Blogging

I once encountered a writer who was very proud of the hundreds of thousands of words he had written. It’s one of the first things he brought up in conversation, in fact. He had written this many books and those books had these many words in them, for a grand total of whatever the gigantic number turned out to be. There was just one big problem:

His writing wasn’t good.

Every writer has to get better. If you don’t look back on your early work and cringe, something is very wrong. You should be improving and developing, which means your early stuff should make you uncomfortable because it represents work that isn’t as good as you are capable of now. That’s all normal. What’s not normal is writing hundreds of thousands of words and never actually improving.

We’ll come back to this topic, but one of the things that blogging does for you is give you the opportunity to grow, develop, stretch as a writer… and ultimately, to hone your craft. One of the reasons blogging is good for this is that you are posting publicly, inviting criticism. When a writer tells me they’ve generated some phenomenal word count but they haven’t actually improved in the process, there could be a lot of reasons for that… but the single biggest one is a lack of critical feedback.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying you should be posting to your blog and then expecting the Internet to rip you apart. What I am saying, however, is that the first step in getting feedback is putting your work where it can be seen. Churning out books that you publish but don’t promote (and therefore no one sees them) is not the same thing. It doesn’t lead to growth and development.

“Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t want plastered on a billboard with your face on it.” – Erin Bury

Another reason that blogging helps you develop, however, is the nature of the blogging platform itself. There’s no reason one post has to be connected to another. A blog lets you explore different topics, work with different types of fiction, try out new styles… and, all the while, you’re doing this where people could conceivably comment and provide feedback.

You can take that a step farther by sharing your blog and promoting it. The more you pass around the links to your articles, the more you post to social media, the more potential feedback you are encouraging. You don’t have to, but it helps. For a lot of authors, just the idea that a blog is public and people could conceivably look at it helps provide some impetus to grow and improve.

If you ask me, I’ll tell you that writing about writing isn’t accomplishing a whole lot. You can extend this to blogging. If you spend a ton of time spinning your wheels and not getting anything done, your blog can become a liability. If, on the other hand, you use your blog to encourage growth and development — to hone your craft and make yourself a better writer — then blogging is serving you. It’s driving you to become better, which will manifest itself in every project you undertake.