Weekly Writing Challenge: Listen to the Voices in Your Head

When we send a post into the blogosphere, we want to make sure our best feet are forward. That means making sure errors like typos or poor grammar don’t detract from what we have to say; it’s one of the reasons The Daily Post highlights grammar issues many of us struggle with. (With which many of us struggle?)

Grammar challenges will follow up on grammar posts, calling on you to put your new-found understanding to the test. It’s one thing to read about the rules, but another to put them into practice.

To participate, tag your posts with “DPchallenge” or leave a link to your post in the comments. (It would also be great if you could link to this post to encourage people to take part – the more the merrier!) Please be sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge; obvious attempts to link-bait will be deleted. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight the week’s best posts on Freshly Pressed each Friday.
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Let me be perfectly candid and say that Daryl’s the Grammar Maestro in these parts. My approach to proper grammar is not unlike the Supreme Court’s approach to pornography: I know it when I see it. I’ve never diagrammed a sentence and have been known to leave participles dangling all willy-nilly, so I look forward to his posts as much as you do.

Weekly Writing Challenge: From Mundane to Meaningful

For some of us, blogging is personal. Others are trying to educate or entertain; many more are hybrids. Yet we’re all storytellers. We all want to feel confident in what we’re offering when we hit “publish.”

No matter what your blogular target is, we want you to hit it, so we’re kicking off Weekly Writing Challenges. They’ll stretch you every which way, asking you to push creative boundaries, master finer points of grammar, and make the most of every WordPress feature.

How it works: Every Monday, we lay out a different challenge along with tips on tackling it, useful resources, and example posts. You read, think, ask questions (we’ll be here!), and get to blogging, tagging your posts with “DPchallenge.” We keep an eye on the tag and highlight the week’s best posts on Freshly Pressed each Friday.

Use the comments to ask questions about the challenge, get feedback, let us know what you think about this series, or share your own challenge ideas. Now: let’s blog!

A Different Perspective

In the spirit of full-disclosure, at least half of the blogs I follow are blogs about dogs. While these blogs may focus on a certain niche reader, there is a common post type that I often see on pet-related blogs: posts written from a different point of view. Namely, posts written from the perspective of the blog owner’s pet.

It is certainly a cute post style to read, and to write. For example, one of my favorite blogs, Love and a Six-Foot Leash, showcases a weekly column written from Chick’s perspective, the blog owner’s dog: “Chix-A-Lot Fridays.” As a reader, these types of posts offer a fresh perspective and a light-hearted way to break up the regular style of the blog.

Writing from someone else’s point of view doesn’t fit with all blog types, but it is an excellent writing exercise that helps you to refine your word selection and stretch your imagination. When writing in someone else’s voice, the process is no longer automatic. Instead, you first need to “become” that person, and then write.

When done well, writing from another person’s perspective sounds natural. In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott writes about dialogue and the same rules hold true here: “First of all, sound your words — read them out loud.” Who knows what a dog’s thoughts, or anyone else’s for that matter, sound like? The idea is to not sound like yourself, and to sound effortless when doing so.

If you do choose to incorporate this exercise or style into your blog, it’s a good idea to make a clear distinction for your readers by using a unique title or preface. This helps to avoid any confusion, especially if you’re suddenly referring to yourself in the third-person. These posts are also an excellent option for a weekly feature, which can help to generate new post ideas and can refresh your regular writing schedule. If you’re writing as a fictional character, be sure to provide background for your readers. If you’re writing as one of your pets or kids, add some pictures for context.

This ability to stretch your writing so that you can express what it’s like to be someone else is an excellent exercise. Even if you find that it won’t work well with your blog in particular, I strongly believe in using writing exercises to help improve as a writer overall. Try it out privately or share it with a friend — it’s a lot of fun and can even be pretty therapeutic.

Have you ever written from someone else’s point of view on your site? If so, how did you incorporate it into your blog? If not, have you ever tried?

In Uffish Thought

Chances are pretty good that you’re familiar with some of the phrases from Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” even if you don’t know the poem by heart (or by name). Maybe you’ve heard word “chortle,” for example, which Carroll coined to suggest something between a chuckle and a snort. It’s a fun (if here and there a little unsettling) little nonsense poem that does a great job of insinuating meaning with made-up words. There can be little doubt that the “beamish boy” returning triumphantly home in a “galumphing” way is bounding or galloping, even though “galumphing” wasn’t a word before Carroll invented it.

If, like the boy awaiting his foe the Jabberwock, you find yourself “in uffish thought” as you await inspiration for your next post, consider playing with nonsense words. It can be a great way to think about the rhythm of your writing without getting caught up in that pesky bear trap of meaning. It can also help you pay closer attention to the ways in which we form different parts of speech. Adverbs and adjectives and nouns are often constructed differently and fit together differently, and working with the forms minus the meaning can provide a neat perspective on the language.

Writing Honestly

I would ask them to tell about some childhood memory, that is, to write it as carelessly, recklessly, fast and sloppily as possible on paper. [...] Their only effort became to tell spontaneously, impulsively, what they remembered.

And I asked for childhood experiences for this reason. A child experiences things from his true self (creatively) and not from his theoretical self (dutifully), i.e. the self he thinks he ought to be. That is why childhood memories are the most living and sparkling and true.

From If You Want to Write

I often feel a lot of anxiety before publishing a post. Why? Mostly because I know that I have blog subscribers and they will (hopefully) be reading the post that I’m agonizing over. I worry about my tone, whether or not what I’m saying could be misunderstood, and if I will offend anyone. It’s embarrassing to admit that I can feel that self-conscious when writing, but it’s true.

This kind of over-thinking and self-censorship completely hinders my ability to write well. In the words of Brenda Ueland, the woman who wrote If You Want To Write, I’m writing from my “theoretical self,” the adult self that worries about what other people think. Good writing is honest, not contrived or safe.

Do you ever feel like you’re holding yourself back? If so, how do you work past it? If you’d like, I encourage you to give Ueland’s writing exercise a shot: pick a childhood memory and write freely. After you’ve written it, think back to how you felt and ask if the process felt any different from how you usually feel when typing away. If you make your childhood memory public, be sure to share it in the comments. (That’s where I’ll be sharing mine and I’d love to see yours!)

Creative Blogging

Last year, I took a poetry workshop called “Hypnopoeia” with the poet Kristen Prevallet. In the workshop, we took a look at different states of mind when writing poetry, ranging from the ways in which rhythm and sound affect the reading of a poem to writing while in a deep meditation or hypnosis. Our sessions were interesting and exciting — there was always the potential of having some really interesting idea or breakthrough while being exposed to ideas that were very far outside of the box.

While hypnosis may not be your thing (and I can say, with experience, that it’s not really mine), there’s something to be said for writing outside of your comfort zone. Using different exercises and practicing different writing styles is an excellent way to bring a new perspective to your usual blogging practice.

Something I’ve done is set up a private “practice” blog where I can post anything I want. (You can sign up for as many WordPress.com blogs as you’d like here and mark them as private by changing your privacy settings.) On my practice blog, it doesn’t matter if what I write is good or not. In fact, I expect the things that I’m writing with experimentation in mind to be bad. Without expectations, I’m free to try anything — there is no self-censorship involved.

One way that I like to challenge myself is by writing in a style that’s completely different from my usual style. As someone who tends to be overly verbose, limiting the amount of words I can use — either to a certain set of words or a certain number of words — can be extremely challenging. Likewise, if you’re a food blogger or write a personal blog, picking a news story to cover may be a fun challenge for yourself.

In addition to writing exercises like the prompts here at the Daily Post, brainstorm some challenges that put you outside of your comfort zone. Like to write politically-minded posts? How about writing from the opposite perspective. Think you don’t have what it takes to be a photo blogger? Try answering one of the Daily Post questions with a picture.

What kind of writing exercises have you tried? Which helped and which were a total flop? Post some of your ideas in the comments — and your examples!