What I Learned in Seven Years of Blogging
By: Venky Ramachandran
Tags: Blogging, Social Media, Storytelling

Articles with sniff-of-curiosity drug titles such as this one are tricky. They not only give the readers a false sense of expectations, typical of a Blogging Guru, doling out expert advice to his enthusiastic followers to build rock-star careers, get dream jobs and earn millions. They also do disservice to the act of blogging -an intensely personal activity of mental hygiene, necessary to clear the cobwebs off your thinking head.

I don’t mean to deride the Blogging Gurudom here. Careers, jobs and money — these are noble pursuits and blogging leads the pack of marketing tools available in the Internet to help you achieve them. However, to appropriate blogging as a means to achieve these pursuits alone is limiting.

So dear readers, if you have come here so far expecting some tips to increase your blog followers, let me redirect you to this excellent guide by Amit Agarwal. I will totally understand if you close the window now and read the hyper-linked post containing 20 valuable blogging tips.

With the electrons of the Internet already exploding with “how-to-”’s of blogging everywhere, I have no interest in adding to the clutter. I am more interested in “Why” rather than “How”, because, you see, when the “why” is clear, tackling “how” is simply a matter of diligence.

Please note. This is going to be a really long post spanning more than 2000 words, and I sincerely hope, amidst frenetic distractions desperate for your attention, you would join me in this journey. Grab your coffee, or better, green tea, if you want. I’ll wait for you, before we get started.

1. You are not the content you publish.

In an age where brands are turning into humans and humans are turning into brands, pundits can be seen rallying around social networks exhorting everyone with their clarion call: Publish or Perish! Yet, there can be nothing more uplifting than discovering our intimate space amidst the mad rush to participate in the Procrustean branding exercise which works by chopping off our human selves to snuggle under a catchy brand title — Social Media Guru, Career Coach,and, the latest one, Digital Transformation Consultant.

How do you discover that space of intimacy? At first, alleviate your anxiety by circling over the edges between who you are and what you want to write about. Be generous enough to accommodate the ragged edges of your personality in your writing. As you start respecting the space between you and your writings, your audience would value them immensely.

2. Ideas come and go, but stories stay forever.

We are living in the golden age of storytelling. Living in the digital age, marketers very well aware that stories are the surfboards which help us wade comfortably in the tempestuous ocean of information which surrounds us. But, how does the whole damn thing work?

This is how I understand the story process.

We humans, engage with life through our sense organs and live through a wide palette of experiences. Our human brains reconcile these experiences through the faculties of reasoning and churn out the inner response in the form of facts. By facts, I refer to them, not in the scientific sense, but in the experiential realm. Now, these facts are imbued with various emotions, depending on the feelings we associate with the experiences. Gradually, with the passing of time, the emotional reactions fade away, as the context of our experience changes. Facts recede into memories and fade away in oblivion.

What happens when you start telling stories to your self and others? You start creating a heady narrative cocktail of fictional facts, charged by the electrical impulse of emotions. The brain releases enough dopamine to make the audience remember these emotionally charged facts and re-construct the context through their own ideas and experiences (by a process called as neural coupling). When this happens, the audience lives through the experiences vicariously along with the storyteller.

Haven’t you observed in your own experience how often you tend to forget the plot of the movie you watched, but you can never forget that emotion which was churned by the movie? There is a reason why we never get tired of hearing the great stories of Shakespeare and back home, the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. We continuously recreate the context of these stories with the experience of our own lives.

When Vishal Bharadwaj narrated the contemporary politics of Kashmir through the seventeenth century writings of Shakespeare in the blockbuster Hindi movie Haider, our hearts bled in grief as Vishal, in a stroke of genius, brought back the searing agony of the Kashmiri Muslim, weaving the 200 year old “Bhand Pather” Kashmiri storytelling tradition inside the mouse-trap plot-point of Hamlet.

3. Try telling stories wearing a good looking mask

Inspired by the transcendence of stories, as you start narrating them, the first thing you would realize is that you have to find a listener. Listening happens only when the listener is willing to suspend his belief and convince himself that the person telling the story is “not me”. This otherness is crucial, a social contract to let storytelling work its magic upon.

What I’ve learned the hard way in all these years of blogging is that you can create good looking masks, ( Yes, I am talking in plural terms. Who said you could only wear one?) and consciously play around without any fear of them eating your face. What you get in bonus, is that you get to figure out many things about yourself in the whole process. Some people prefer to call this mask, personal branding, but I prefer the term mask, as it reminds me of the conscious choice I make in wearing them, not just in the world of bits, but also in the world of atoms.

I’ve closely observed two people who did this incredibly well, in their unique journeys of self-discovery. One of them later turned out to be a good friend of mine. Long before the age of twitter, he created a fictional character called “Mark Zorro” as a thought experiment to see what will happen if he inhabits this fictional character and explore his inner world. He could voice his thoughts freely, and, in his own words,

..experience the vulnerability of placing my thinking alongside the thoughts of others, but ,to also see if I could construct a way of life for myself that I couldn’t find in a textbook.

The essence of his character was captured in the byline he had created. “Mark Twain wasn’t Mark Twain. Mark Zorro isn’t Mark Zorro”.

Another person who ran this experiment with a wonderful sense of humour was FakeGrimLock. Annoyed by the high authoritarian world of tech blogging, he decided to have some fun and created a minimum viable personality to prove a theory, in his own words…

. .. [that] who you are doesn’t matter. In fact, truth requires that you aren’t anyone, because if you’re someone, whatever you say is always biased. It’s influenced by what you know about that person…It’s the words…not the person that matters

4. Writing is a lot like cooking. And blogging ? Slow-cooking.

You would know what I mean, if you’ve tried your hands in cooking. Sometimes, the dosa doesn’t come in proper shape, no matter what you do and every now and again, the dosa blooms and tastes like the perfect sun-kissed tribute to humanity.

Traditional wisdom treats blogging as an ersatz cousin of writing, and there is a germ of truth in that. When words can disappear into nowhere like foam in the digital ether, you tend to get lazy with words. However, if you approach blogging as a perpetual work-in-progress, it brings in the discipline necessary to bridge the deep chasm between the fluidity of the thought and the solidity of word.

Blogging is an invitation to be a lively raconteur of stories which are born this moment, right now, captured through the rainbow of media available in the palm of your hand.

The real fun begins when these blips-of-consciousness stories, mature and slowly attune themselves with the staccato rhythms of the facts, opinions and reactions which gather around the stories like termites creeping out of wood works. If you feel strongly convinced about the taste, you can package this slow-cooked output for publishing, Or, if you aren’t, you can let your stories simmer more to make it more delicious with time.

5. It doesn’t matter which narrative God you worship

Some time back, Seth Godin wrote a short, insightful post about Clarity Vs Impact. Seth argued that in the longer run, impact is far more important than clarity because, in Seth’s words, “humans don’t use explanations to make change happen. They change, and then try to explain it”

In Seth’s bias for action and impact, I think he has chosen to ignore a lot more happening beneath the surface. Let me share my backstory.

Back in 2007, when I was wet behind the ears in the emerging world of blogging, I devoutly worshiped the narrative Gods of clarity. Enchanted by how the blogging medium mirrored the fluid nature of human perceptions, my blog served two functions, firstly as a chronicle of my perceptions and thoughts as they found expression and secondly as a witness to the kinesis, the movement that unfolds the shift in perceptions over time.

I didn’t care a hoot about who read it ( mostly my friends anyways), how many page-views my blog attracted, and what the audience felt. My blog was my personal expression, and strictly remained so. In my hermetic insulation from the outer world, I never realized that my communication would slowly get afflicted by the curse of knowledge.

Curse of knowledge is the painful realization of the truth that what seems obvious to you isn’t always so, especially when your audience gets lost like Hansel in the woods, unable to follow the trail of bread-crumbs you’ve left for their journey to arrive at where you are currently anchored in your stream-of-thought.

When I clearly understood the nature of my curse, in my futile attempt to reach the middle path (the sweet-spot which manages to create an impact without fogging clarity) , I succumbed to the familiar human habit — jump from one pole to its opposite. I began to embrace the antithesis - the narrative Gods of Impact.

I read everything I could gather to follow the rituals observed to please the Gods of impact, be it priceless advice on writing from the masters, nuggets of tips from the SEO Experts, and ready-made templates of bait-clicking headlines from pros, in my earnest attempt to share and amplify the message.

As I got more enthusiastic to share my message for a widely growing audience, I didn’t notice that I was unconsciously becoming a con-artist, narrating stories deceitfully like Ponzi schemes for the gullible minds. My writing became contaminated with narrative bias.

Image Credits: Sketchplanations Blog

In my attempt to absolve my writing (and thereby thinking) from the curse of knowledge and narrative bias, I’ve begun to focus closely on narratives whose span of influence deeply affected not just my writing, but also my consulting engagements.

Today, I enjoy the irony of zooming in my lens on narratives only after Taleb took enough pains to argue against the perils of narrative thinking with all its biases. Rather than getting cynical about them, I reason to myself, it would be more wiser to leverage the power afforded by them responsibly.

Guess what? When you focus your attention on narratives, it really doesn’t matter which narrative Gods you worship.

6. Are you kicking up dust?

I love Whatsapp. Its no-fluff, ascetic approach to customer experience deeply resonates with me. During 2011, when Whatsapp stood tall among the Top 20 apps in US, during a dimsum lunch with the staff, someone had asked Jan Koum, founder of Whatsapp, why he wasn’t crowing to the press about it. Koum replied,

“Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you’re not focusing on the product.”

Every content marketer worth his salt in the Internet today is waiting to feed you with popcorn content — Looks good, tastes good, atrociously expensive to do, and no nutritional value.

Before you set out to write, it is always valuable to ask yourself honestly, are you kicking up dust?

7. Rumours about the death of blogging are greatly exaggerated.

Blogging in the Internet can sometimes look like playing a game of musical chairs. The Internet keeps arranging the chairs every time differently, and you are always running around them, to the tune of the music (some might say, cacophony and they are right as well) played by the elite band at the top. Every time, when the music stops, and the tune changes, the chairs evolve, and the ones who were caught up with their old ones, fail to move on.

Marketers, and the content cottage industry at large is busy preaching the message — Blogging is dead, tied with their old religious belief that the medium would influence the message, and the slow death of the medium would thereby ring the death knell of the message itself.

No, they are wrong in multiple levels. In the new world, where the message is the medium, bloggers have become the modern day pied pipers, playing in the town square, luring the audience away to their private mountains where they become writers through the shared rituals practiced with them.

The mediums are going to change, every now and then, as the message liquefies further to adapt with the breathtaking diversity of online creative expressions sprawling in the Web. So, in short, you are left with only one choice.

Keep blogging and have fun with everything else, as long as you have the energy to play your own tune, jamming in unison with the music played by the bands out there.