How a blog post came to be: Behind the scenes

I published a blog post earlier today in which I advocate for you to create your own personal website. If you don't have a website, stop reading this post and go read the personal website post. I hope the personal website post encourages you to take up space on the web with your own site. On your website, you can share and publish what interests you without worrying about algorithms or how another platform presents your content or decides in whose feeds your content should go. Anyway, I digress!

How did my blog post come to be? I want to take you behind the scenes. I will talk about how I wrote the post with help from notes, then reflect on how those notes -- and the contents of the post -- were the culmination of months of thought and experience.

Writing notes

I sometimes write notes to ground my work, particularly at work (I'm a technical writer!) but sometimes on this blog.

To start writing the post, I wrote the following notes on my TODO list:

The web is yours

• The web is yours to make.
• Having a personal website is cool.
• Design it as you want, write about your interests. Take up space.
• My blog is home to my thoughts on coding, mental health; it documents stories, learnings, guides.
• What about building an audience? You don’t need to have an audience; you can make for the sake of making — to learn. To be. I have been blogging for a few years now; my blog posts have started conversations.
• There are plenty of other people out there who may find your words interesting, thought provoking, comforting.
• You don’t have to write. You can code. Make a list of songs you like. Publish drawings.

These notes, written while I was on a train, were my anchors as I started writing the essay. I had many ideas in my head that were not encapsulted in my notes but I knew that having some bullet points would help me work on the piece. Indeed it did. I spent a lot of time thinking about the direction I wanted to take; the narrative of companies dictating our experiences on the web, but there being hope: you can start your own website to take back control. My notes helped me get some ideas on the proverbial paper that I could use to guide the piece.

If you read my essay, you will notice that many of these points are covered. Only some are verbatim; for other bullet points, you should be able to pick up on the spirit throughout the piece. For example, I didn't write "Having a personal website is cool." in the piece, although I could have!

If you are struggling to start writing a blog post, consider writing some notes!

Should I write a blog post if someone else has covered the topic?

I have wanted to write about this topic for a few months, but one thing stopped me: my wonder about whether the topic had already been covered enough, for other bloggers have written calls to action to start a blog. With that said, the more such content is available -- and the more we explore ways to articulate the importance of personal websites! -- the more we can get the word out. My core takeaway: don't let the fact someone else has written about a topic stop you from writing about it, too. Your perspectives matter.

After I felt comfortable with the idea that I could write a call to action to start a personal website, I wrote notes. With my notes, I felt more motivated. I shared the idea with someone. They encouraged me to write the post.

Of note, this post -- and many other of my long-form posts -- are the culmination of a lot of thought. Whereas a blog post may be written in an hour or two, the experiences that fuel the post can be the culmination of efforts that have taken hours, days, months, or years. This was the case for my personal website essay. I had the ideas for months. I needed the motivation to write, an angle -- which I helped solidify with my notes -- and to feel confident that I had something unique to say.

If you have an idea for a blog post and you don't quite know what to say yet, do not worry. Take some time! Indeed, my Advent of Technical Writing series, which I later turned into a book, started with an essay that took me months to feel confident enough to write. The mental pieces started to fall into place for a series. I felt more confident about writing on subject matter (technical writing). That, and my newfound excitement, propelled me to write more on the topic.