5 Tips on Blogging

One of the promotional tools writers have been told to use as a way of getting their word out about their stories is blogging.  It can be both fun, but also time consuming. And coming up with ideas for blogs every week can become an issue.  What is there to blog about that can be helpful to your fiction writing?

1.      Blog about your research – This is a no brainer.  I always find items that I look up that I might not use in my story that might make a good blog. For instance, my research on ghostly legends of the southwest took me back to my childhood and hearing my mother tell me of the story of La Llorona, an infamous story of a ghostly woman who haunts the waterways and rivers in the southwest, looking for her lost children. It was an old legend that Hispanic parents told their children to keep them from going out at night. I used it for several blogs around Halloween.

2.      Blog about places you visit – this too was part of research on one of my stories. I spent a weekend travelling by train across the Rocky Mountains and was able to use it as the basis for a blog about train travel. But it can be a fun car trip you make, or even a visit to the local museum. One of the places I also blogged about was a visit to the historic Brown Palace in Denver.

3.      Blog about simple, every day things – one of my friends, Darla Bartos, who has written a wonderful mystery set in South Africa, has a great way of coming up with blog ideas. She writes about many every day events, ideas that just hits her and how they affect her writing. She did a great blog on hitting all the stop lights and how that encouraged her writing progress.

4.      Blog about classes you might be taking – I have often blogged about the conferences I attend and about the workshops I’ve attended. One of the reasons I like to blog about them is that it encourages me to take better notes at the conference, and it also serves as a way of reinforcing what I learn. It also is a good way to force me to get those notes transcribed when I get home.  Then I can keep them in a file on my computer and available should I ever need them again.

5.      Review a book on your blog – I’ve done author profiles on My Writing Corner blog and have sometimes offered up reviews, but this is another way to get in some interesting writing and also can give you some help with your own writing. 

I am going to try reviewing writing books on this blog. I have dozens of writing books and recently someone asked me what my favorite books on writing were and which I always keep handy.  Starting next week, I will give a list of some of those books and then I will begin to review some of the ones that have been so helpful to me.