Writing vs. Blogging

The past few weeks I’ve been writing an article or report of sorts. I’m not as experienced at it as I’d like, so it’s been quite a strug­gle; at times very distressing. But also very rewarding, given all the mistakes I’ve made and learned from.

All my life I’ve felt an urge to write, but I hadn’t found a suit­able medium for satisfying this need, not until I started this blog 2.5 years ago. Since then, I’ve written a lot, and become better at writing – or so I thought.

Blogging as I have done it is scribbling. I usually start with a quite vague idea about what I’ll write about, as well as how long the post will be, and then find out as I’m writing. Often I end up writing about something different, focusing on aspects I didn’t know interested me. It is exploratory writing, that doesn’t start with a distinct idea.

Writing longer, whole pieces, however, requires an idea. Such writing indeed benefits from exploratory writing, but it is not the same thing. Which was one of the mistakes I made. The idea I had was too fuzzy when I started writing. I should have done more exploration and not been as eager to produce a first draft.

Also, in writing texts of a certain length and a specific topic, you’ll need to find out how to present that topic, with a begin­ning, an end, and something that takes the reader from here to there. This structure became apparent as I wrote drafts in part exploratory mode, part drafting mode, which was an awkward and time consuming way to do it. What further complicated it was also that I had a poor sense of who would read it, on what level of understanding the typical reader of my text would be.

Blogging is great (for me) for exploring ideas, for expressing things and seeing what they look like, and also for improving linguistically. But it won’t take me far in making me a better writer. For that, I need to try writing articles and other texts with well-defined topics, and specific lengths.