One of my favourite essays by Harlan Ellison is “How To Make Life Interesting”, which appeared in his column (and book of the same name) An Edge in My Voice. In this essay, Ellison talked about how he slew the beast of boredom one day while having lunch at an L.A. deli.
Bored to tears by the prattle of a trio of vacuous people sitting near him, Ellison decided to mess with their minds. After paying the check, he got up and non-chalantly insinuated that he was a detective hired by the wife of the boyfriend of the female of the trio. Then, Ellison rushed out of the deli and pondered the chaos he’d left in his wake.
Why not apply that kind of mischief and sensibility to your writing?
For those of us who do it for a living, writing is a way of paying the bills. And, maybe, funding a vice or two.
But writing is, first and foremost, a method of communication. It’s putting thoughts and ideas and opinions out in the wild. How you do that is as important as what you want to say. If you don’t do the job properly, you’ll quickly lose your audience and your efforts will have been wasted.
How do you do the job properly? Here are a few thoughts.
You hear a lot about guest posting in the blogging world. Writing guest posts, as many will tell you, can help increase your visibility and the perception of your expertise. It could even make you a few dollars. But what if you’re a blog publisher?
As you may or may not know, I maintain two other blogs. One of them, which I run with my business partner, focuses on technical communication. A few weeks ago, the idea of approaching other tech comm bloggers to do posts for us entered my head and just wouldn’t leave.
So, I fired off an email to a handful of well-known bloggers in that niche inviting them to contribute posts to my company’s blog. The response was generally positive, to say the least. Of the people who responded (85% of them), most said yes. The rest said yes, but when they had the time. Two of the guest posts have already seen the light of the Web, and the response has been good.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from about guest blogging, from the perspective of a blog publisher.