Whatever you do, it gets easier with practice. Even blogging, you may start off with having so much of things that you want to express but find yourself quickly running out of ideas. Or you will have so much of ideas in your head but the moment that you sit in front of your laptop, you can’t even type one sentence.
If you love to read blogs, you must be wondering how many bloggers can consistently churn out tonnes of original content and ideas. Well….
Practice, practice, practice
Many people have natural flair for writing. OK, let’s put those people aside. Not everyone is borned to be able to express their thoughts in writing and be able to articulate their articles well. But with practice, you can. Initially, your blog may contain lots of half baked sentences written in broken English or Manglish (mixing Mandarin and English) or bahasa pasar. But with practice, you will surely get better at it.
For me, I spent 18 months of my working life sitting in front of the PC everyday replying emails. Everyday, we are supposed to reply minimum 120 emails ranging from different topics. But I never followed the guidelines- I consistently strive to ensure I give clear and concise answers to queries instead of just typing brief answers. We have incentive for people who are able to meet the target of replying 120 emails and sad to say, I’ve never met it. But the results of that 18 months- I find that I am able to write well and develop the ‘flow’ fairly quickly. That’s why I always believe that we should aim to develop better skills and ‘do the right thing’ to help and serve others instead of looking at short term monetary gains. The skills we acquire is priceless and it will serve is very well in the future.
My best friend used to have very bad command of English. But she practiced – when I was studying outstation, many friends were too busy with their lives to keep in touch. But my best friend wrote me lots and lots of long letters- started in broken English. She told me she had to always refer to the dictionary to find the right words to say. Then, her English gradually improved- she always practiced both written and spoken English. Today, she works in one of the largest multinational company and she could converse and write good English. So again, it takes practice, persistence and patience.
You need not force yourself to choose a job that involves lots of writing. You can just practice by posting articles in your blog. Just don’t give up easily when the going gets tough, please.
Drawing Inspiration from Everything Around You
As I have mentioned in my earlier post, many bloggers draw inspirations from happenings around them. Due to their interest in a certain area, they constantly keep themselves updated of the latest happenings in that area. For those who blog about politics, within 15 minutes of the breaking news in CNN, the news would have been the latest blog post. It’s the same for technology, fashion and celebrity blogs.
I love reading- nowadays I finally have time to read the papers, magazines and books. And during each reading sessions, there are a number of topics that I felt inspired to write about. I can’t be rushing to my laptop and do a whole night marathon just writing articles. So what I normally do is that I carry a notebook around, jot down some points and reference to the article so that I can find it later. If it is newspapers, I remove the page and put it aside to write about in future- and I can say that my newspaper stack are really building up. After I write the article, I will then dispose the clippings.
Yes, blogging takes a lot of passion and time. I am not sure about others, but what kept me going is that what I write can help another human being and/or I get to express my views. And when I sit down to type, I sometimes lose track of time. And the beauty about online self publishing is that the article sits forever in cyberspace- and years down the line- someone will find it, read it and draw some inspiration and knowledge from it.
