I have been writing for a while and have definitely found my own distinctive writing voice. Blogging, on the other hand, was a different ball game--putting up your thoughts on the web, for friend and foe alike, raw, unprocessed, unedited. Wow!
How does one find the voice for that? Not too personal, not too boring, not too pompous or distant. Writing for unseen, anonymous readers.
I have been blogging for almost six months, with some success--top 20 in Wikio UK in both culture and literature, high ranks in technorati, and top blog sites. But I had not found my real voice, me. I was not sharing who I really was, just what I thought.
An accident helped me find my own blogging voice. I wrote a post of great interest to the large Christian community to which I belong. I had 1400 page views within a week, 852 of them unique page views (the rest were repeats because of the 60 or so comments.)
And as always happens when you have a sudden spike in page views, most dropped off, but not all. My graph of page views was suddenly on another level.
I suddenly had a real audience--people I knew, whom I worshipped with every Sunday, and met mid-week every week. True, I did not know which individuals, but I suddenly felt I had real people reading my blogs, who somewhat knew me, and were interested in what I had to say.
There is nothing like that for finding one's real writing or blogging voice.
I have now found my own distinctive blogging voice on two of my blogs, theoxfordchristian.blogspot.com and wanderingbetweentwoworlds.blogspot.com. I still need to find my own voice, who I really am, on my third blog, a literary blog called thegoodbooksblog.blogspot.com.
I think of the pop psychology book popular when I was a teen, "Why am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am." It goes on to say, "I am afraid to tell you who I am because you may not like who I am, and who I am is all I have."
So, a truly good blog, a truly interesting one, is written by someone who is not afraid to tell you who she really is.
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