What to Write

What indeed…

I read an article yesterday that boldly declared, “blogs [are] ‘essential’ to a good career”. The article offered some advice for newbie bloggers:

…pick your topics carefully and have a purpose. ”The most interesting blogs are focused and have a certain attitude,” says [Phil] van Allen [a faculty member of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena]. ”You need to have a guiding philosophy that you stick to. You cannot one minute pontificate on large issues of the world and the next minute be like, ‘My dog died.’ “

However, a few hours later I read this soul-bearing post by Jeffrey Zeldman, the globally-known web standards guru who has plenty of worldly issues upon which he could easily pontificate:

In 1993… my uncle, took me to lunch. I was newly sober and raw as a razor burn, but pleased to be coherent and in his company. After some minutes of chit-chat, he leaned forward and said, “I think your mother has Alzheimer’s.”

What followed was an intensely personal tribute to his mother’s struggle with the disease, and an unflinching description of the heart-rending effect it had on his family. Zeldman captures the disease’s unrelenting and frightening destruction with chilling precision; if Alzheimer’s has touched your family, you will likely fight tears. You might even if it hasn’t.

Between these two articles, I see mixed messages as to what we millions of bloggers should be writing about.

I also see some hints.

I’ve come to think about blogging as part professional development, part personal journalism. For Christmas last year, I received a collection of personal journalism pieces. Each pulls back the curtain on a byline, revealing a human being diagnosed with cancer, or a person still grappling with the loss of a sister over 20 years ago.

I was surprised that these journalists would be so open, and apparently they were too — some of them initially balked at the idea of ‘reporting’ on themselves. Their thinking: journalists report the news, they don’t become the news (although that line has blurred significantly over the years).

But reading these articles, I came to the simple conclusion their authors must have reached while writing them: exposing the reality that lurks beneath a shiny but impersonal surface connects us to one another. We find shared experiences, common successes and similar heartbreaks.

It’s the same with blogs.

My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s. Reading Zeldman’s post, I remembered the visits when my grandmother no longer recognized any of us, but would chuckle as though we were all in on a joke. I remembered cleaning her nursing home ‘apartment’, hustling out bottle after bottle of half-drunk sherry, bottles she had simply forgotten were there. We had to laugh or else we’d cry. I remembered the weeks near the end, when she was barely a shell of the person she’d been, and all we could do was wait for it to be over.

“Blogs ‘essential’ to a good career” states that bloggers need a guiding philosophy. How about this: write about things you really care about, and write it for yourself. That’s the best kind of writing to read, and the best to write as well.