“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.” – Tennessee Williams

Here’s a fun little topic to tackle: what makes for honest writing? I try to be as honest as possible when I set to compose anything. It’s just not always easy, especially in trying to sound original. I think sometimes being brutally honest actually stifles creativity.

The God-honest truth isn’t always the best thing to put straight into print. There’s letting things off your chest, and then there’s saying too much. It’s not always easy to put things as succinctly as you may want to.

Your goal may not to be delicate or succinct at all. It’s still often difficult to say what you mean to say without somehow saying something you didn't. It’s too easy to read between the lines and try to find double meanings to certain words or phrases.

Sometimes in the editing process, you second guess yourself. You may expound on something that you probably shouldn’t have bothered spending too much time on. It’s what makes writing such a frustrating craft.

The idea of being so honest in writing that it becomes inseparable from the author who penned it is I suppose a sort of ultimate goal for all writers. The trick is to be honest, but not absolutely exhaustive in that honesty. You give away a little at a time, and that’s what can make writing so therapeutic.

For those minds as busy and often overloaded as mine, it’s a sort of necessity to be just a little honest with a thing or two. You can dress it up a bit and make it less threatening; it doesn’t make it any less true, really. But having a few secrets has to be healthy, right?

Writers seem to have more reason to be mysterious than most. The more mysteries the author has, the more material to be used in the craft. At least, that’s how I like to look at it.

"Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers." – Isaac Asimov

Have you ever found yourself not sure what to write for your blog? There may be days when you sit by yourself and brainstorm a few things that you’ll probably write about later. Likely you won't use everything that you wrote, but you may find something that you were thinking about could make a useful blog post.

But more often than not, it’s likely that you find yourself uninspired by your notes. Other times, you won’t have any notes to go off of at all for blog ideas. Fortunately, there are some easy ways to make sure that you always have something to write about.

Consider this simple exercise. Towards the end of your day, jot down some of the challenges you faced during the day. Then, tell how you succeeded (or didn’t succeed) in solving them. You'd be surprised how little solutions can make for a short, but sweet post that your audience would find interesting.

Showing dedication to the little things is pretty important to people. It makes you more human to those that read your blog. You want people to be delighted by what they read, and be able to connect to these “little things” sorts of posts. Over time, the little things add up. Before you know it, you have a vibrant and interesting blog. Just three or four little successes can go a long way.

What about the challenges you haven’t solved? Are you still working towards solutions? It's fine to let people know what you're working on to better improve yourself and whatever it is you do. Looking natural is paramount to good blogging practice. In any case, be as positive as you can even when you’ve been dealing with bad days. Keep a bright outlook on things and your blog readers will thank you for it.

You may also want to write down any missteps you took during the day. Now, it would seem that missteps are not the best sort of thing to write about, since on a blog you typically want to be as positive and helpful as possible. But there is a way to spin such mistakes, especially if you find a solution to prevent such a mistake from happening again. You may want to write about what you do to prevent those sorts of mistakes in the future. Be sure not to draw attention to the failure, but instead the solution.

People want to see you succeed, but be sure to admit how you’ve overcome certain challenges. Human beings enjoy success stories. It's easy to be inspired by reading about others overcoming difficulties and challenges.

If you're ever stuck for a blog topic, just brainstorm and let the ideas come naturally. Just let the events of the day unfold in your mind and recount the little victories of the day. You might be surprised with what you find. That way, when you have a dull, uninteresting day, you have a post to inspire both yourself and everyone who happens to read your blog.

So many times I have begun writing on a project and asked myself: why should anyone care about this? A lot of the time, I'll have an idea, then not really care for it myself. I don't discard it. I make a note of it and move on, because I never know where exactly I could find a purpose for that idea. Recently, I've been finding that I need to take more profound steps in my writing. I need to write about things that seem to be often avoided. People care if you bring something up that they don't expect, and sometimes such unexpectedness is met with lots of fear and negativity. But that cannot be a detractor in what a writer decides to write.

There is nothing wrong with writing reviews, or reflective journals, or informational articles. There's nothing wrong with writing light humor or a little piece of flash fiction. There's nothing wrong with writing an adventure novel that exists purely to thrill a reader. As long as each of those pieces of writings fulfill their specific purpose and not just some broad sense of having written something.

However, there is a bit of a paradox here, since it is important for a writer to write even when he or she is not finding a purpose for the words being written. But when publishing something, make sure people will have a reason to care about what you've written. Don't just publish something because it sounds good. I've been guilty of that myself. Publish something that actually will add something to the lives of those reading it. Otherwise, you're just spinning your wheels.

by Richard Rowell, Staff Writer

Awhile back, I decided to give up on SEO. However, this doesn't mean that I don't care about optimizing for search anymore. I decided instead to focus on searcher intent, not the search engines themselves. Trying to write for a moving target like an ever-evolving search algorithm is really counter-productive, except for those that are making a lot of money trying to "crack the code" and get "instant results." However, true sustained success doesn't work that way. Instead, it makes the most sense to find what your audience is searching for and how they are searching for it. But it's not just about finding the trending topics and keyword phrases. There's a lot more to it than that.

There are services that claim that they help you chase the "long-tail" keyword phrases that deliver valuable traffic. Actually, some of these services are quite reputable and there's a lot of research involved in finding these golden opportunities in search. But actually, you can do a lot of this work on your own with just a bit of critical thinking. Think about the questions that your audience have asked you or might ask you. You write about those. Then if you do find something trending, there's no hurt in writing about it, but try to spin it in a way where that information will still be useful down the road.

When it comes to business blogging, there are many different perspectives on how to create content in an organized and systematic way. Probably one of the most predominant of these methods is about understanding "buyer personas." By this method, popularized by marketing giant Hubspot, a business would go through an entire process of researching where these fictional characters are on the "buyer's journey" and what they are asking search engines at various points on that journey. The common interests and habits of these people are often also considered as supplemental content to lure in people not even realizing they're being led to a landing page to a sell a product that's actually unrelated. While the latter part of that strategy I'm not terribly fond of, understanding the buyer's journey is actually a good idea.

The buyer's journey essentially consists of three stages: identifying a problem, researching and seeking out solutions for that problem, and making a decision on purchasing or otherwise acquiring that solution. Obviously, depending on which of those three stages a potential reader or client may be in that journey, different questions would be asked. This is the part of the "buyer personas" that I like. I don't like to categorize people past the questions they are asking, although understanding your audience through market research certainly doesn't hurt, either, of course. But for purposes of web writing, answering people's questions and positioning yourself as a thought leader on a given topic is better than leading visitors through landing pages. I'm not a fan of "capturing leads" and "marketing funnels." Perhaps, they work but that's not my style.

I'm more interested about the topics themselves, and why people ask certain questions at certain points in certain ways. Possibly, the psychology is more fascinating to me than trying to create this perfect "persona" that you're marketing to. You're not marketing to personas. You're marketing to real life people. I know the persona concept sounds really good and all, and well-researched personas can lead to a lot of successful content being created. But you don't need a big marketing company and a huge staff to be successful in knowing what your audience wants. You just have to ask the right questions and have valuable answers for them.

If you can't answer the questions, it's possible there are other expert sources out there that can. While it sounds counter-intuitive to lead people to other people to answer your questions, as long as that someone isn't a direct competitor of yours, it's actually a really good idea. Some people will remember that you provided the link to that information. That's good for you. All you have to do is be sure to curate the best content that you can. The best way to do it is type a question into a search engine, and if it's not clearly answered without some work, and you have a way to answer it, then by all means do it.

The problem with building personas and all those sorts of things is that if the plan doesn't work, it can take a while to come up with another plan. But if you just naturally come up with content through everyday questions that you can provide timely and useful answers for, you may find that while your "hits" may not be as high as some marketers can promise you, the interaction and organic traffic will be a lot better than you might expect.

Feel like you might be confounding readers with your writing? I know I've had times when my writing even confounds myself. The entire point of writing, of course, is to convey an idea in as clear and concise a form as possible, is it not?

Sometimes, I infuse my writing with a lot more emotion at times than at others. Other times I will even let my sarcasm take over, which can rub some readers the wrong way. At other times, I seem to leave people confounded. Perhaps, it's sometimes by design, but not always.

Sure, it might be okay to leave people a little confused for the benefit of making readers have to figure something out for themselves. But sometimes I just write something because it sounds good. Then, I just publish it. Then, it seems that I somehow expect people figure it out for themselves.

Making people think, I believe, is the core of writing in the first place. But confounding others with your writing probably isn't a sound strategy. Then again, simply stating the facts and stating opinions, however educated, does not seem to be enough to me sometimes. There's obviously plenty written out there about infusing personality and "spice" into writing. But I think the most important thing to do in writing is to expand one's horizons.

This process is two-fold. First, it is through the act of writing and expressing an idea in a written, tangible form. Then, it is through the act of reading, identifying and analyzing, then coming to conclusions afterwards. If it leaves you with more questions than answers that may not be a bad thing.

So confounding a reader may actually be a good thing, sometimes. It really depends on the topic. By having to think about something in more depth you'll remember it better. Then, those ideas will have impact beyond the words on the printed page. Still, be sure it's a topic worth that level of reader commitment. Someone might be looking for a quick answer that could reasonably have one. Then, there's no point in dragging it out.

But there are times that connecting with the reader on a deeper level can be worth it. I've written before about whether web writers should produce more questions or answers. In that piece, I came to the conclusion that articles that engage the reader in a conversation of thought are strictly better than "free information." While it may not be as simple to digest, it's overall better for the reader. Other readers offered up the opinion that writing that really engages your mind is most rewarding. It's especially good when readers can connect with pieces emotionally. Those pieces tend to perform the best over the long term.

People talk about trying to make emotional connections through writing all the time. But this is actually incredibly hard to do when it comes to certain subjects. Writing through personal experience is the only way I've ever been able to do it, I think. It's good to go into a piece in mind that others will need to take something away from it. You have to make it worth their time to read.

Confounding readers may sound like a bad idea. But it some cases it may not be. If you feel the need to write something, and aren't sure why you wrote it, write it anyway. Chances are someone else will get what you were saying. That's the whole point of writing after all, to share your ideas. You may not even fully understand them yet.

Here's a question I've been asked a ton of times: "Why can't you write a novel?" For someone whose dream as a four-year-old was to be a novelist - and a mapmaker, and a pharmacist, and a starship captain - this would be a legitimate question as I have not yet produced a novel. My obvious inability to properly compose a novel is a topic I've pondered many times. In fact, I've written a lot of drafts of pieces trying to answer that very question, but I was never happy with what i wrote on the subject. So yes, this is yet another attempt to try and answer that question, but this time, I actually have the answer.

I can't write a novel because I simply cannot write a novel. I can't do outlines, as I never have, and never will. Of course, there are novelists out there who have never outlined, either. There are novelists out there that basically just write forever, then let their trusted beta readers and editors do the rest of the work. But in my case, I simply change directions in plot too often and character development often meanders and stalls. It's not even a lack of focus. I just lose interest in what I'm writing if I spend too much time on it. That's right. I simply cannot hold focus for fifty thousand plus words. I can't even hold focus for ten thousand words, never mind anymore than that. Is it a weakness? Perhaps, it is. Or perhaps, I'm simply not a novelist.

I'm not saying that I will never, ever write a novel. But it is fair to say that my dream of being a novelist is indefinitely on hold. Truth is, I'm not even good at short stories. Flash fiction is perhaps the only creative future that I have outside of poetry - and poems are definitely a specialty of mine. The thing is, I can't combine my poetry with my stories. I've tried that, and it was a disaster. So basically, my future as a creative writer appears to be relegated to simply flash fiction pieces and poetry. I'm finally feeling content with that.

However, that being said, the truth is that writing a novel takes a ton of energy. For whatever reason, I do not ever want to expend that level of energy on one particular project ever. I feel that my energy needs to be divided more efficiently across a wider breadth of subjects. My brain is always hitting on many different things, so why should I force it to do simply one thing? Yes, I have a tendency to hyper-focus, but this hyper-focus when it comes to trying to write a novel is actually very, very bad. If I have to figure out where to take a story next, it is NOT going to follow the original path. It's going to go bonkers. 

The interesting thing is if you give me someone else's story that already exists, I'm actually pretty good at identifying shortcomings and fleshing things out. So it's not that I can't tell a story. It's that the stories I try to tell are evolving so constantly in my mind that everything I write up to a point becomes obsolete. And that is so monumentally frustrating that I cannot begin to tell you how much worthless text I will have to eventually go through and pare down into flash fiction pieces. So, at least, I have a plan of what to do with all my failed stories.

So yes, it is very likely that I will in fact put out a book someday. It will be a collection of short flash fiction stories. Some will share characters. Many won't. But a novel will have to be a collaboration with someone else, because I simply do not have the capacity on my own to keep everything going in one direction or follow any logical plot structure. My brain simply does not operate in that way because real life is not that way. I am far too spontaneous to be forced into any sort of literary conventions. So perhaps one day I'll write a novel that is extremely disorganized and completely wacko. Not saying there isn't anything already out there like that, but since I doubt it will sell, I may as well just post my insane creative scribblings at will.

Have you ever considered writing a novel? Good luck. I think I'll just stick to the greatest hits from my Crazy Idea Bin. That should be good enough for me.

The blank page is like a canvas, they say. Actually, a blank page is more like a desert. It can be the most dreaded thing known to humanity. This is why whenever you try to always start with SOMETHING. some sort of opening theme like in a TV show, or a prompt, or something. Always have something to start with. Because just when you think you can't fill a page, you probably will. 

How is this? Start with today's date, then just list some things that are on your mind. If your inspiration can't be sparked by something that you just wrote, list some of your favorite things, and see if you have anything to write about them. By this point, you've probably already filled a page and come up with writing ideas for about a week. Considering this sort of brainstorming is how I practiced writing on a daily basis for years, I can say from personal experience that it works.

However, I don't really participate in brainstorming sessions anymore, nor do I use many prompts. Why is this? It's because sometimes it's okay to just let ideas come to you as they will. Unless you desperately need to fill a need for some assignment, not filling a page is not some crime. Just jot down things in a notebook or some organization program like Evernote or a memo pad app of some sort. That way when you're starved for ideas later, you still have them. Then you'll fill many pages just from that single note. 

Still, I've found more often that not, as long as you go into any writing with a purpose, you will fill that page. It works similarly with art. In photography, just point at whatever and shoot. In drawing or painting, just doodle for a bit and work from that. You'd be surprised in these supposedly dark moments of lacking inspiration that you'll find the beginnings of some of your best creative work ever.

Words will come to me whether or not I want them to. It is what I do with them that matters, to give them a meaning and a purpose. Then it is up to whomever reads them to decide if they are worthy. Words are just thought fragments, loosely translated into a common tongue never quite perfect. Limits to vocabulary hinder true perfect expression, but with care and practice, one can succeed in mostly getting a point across. At times, it is only with great difficulty, and often never on the first attempt. 

Then, two similar but disparate ideas intermingle, distracting from the original thought. Confusion sets in, creative chaos ensues, and frustration builds. Then writing blocks emerge seemingly for no reason. Fear of losing that writer's touch begins to swell. The words must then be forced out, as thoughts are still there, but stubbornly refuse to be translated. Perhaps, those thoughts are not yet worthy of being shared. Or perhaps, there is a lack of the skill necessary to share them properly and precisely? Such awkward moments cannot be avoided when you constantly deal in words. Sentences and phrases never seem quite perfect, but then it is decided that they are good enough for now. They can be altered later.

The words will come, and they must. So I just let them come. I'll figure out what to do with them later. Then, it's up to you to do with them what you will. I am only a delivery boy. It's your choice what to make of these words I bring you. I hope they do you some good. Hopefully they won't befuddle you too much, and if they do, maybe they'll make you write something, too. If I inspire any positive action, or any action at all, then the words have done their part, I've done my job, and the world goes on.

And then I get writer's block again. Sigh.

The words will come.