The end of mid-July’s rushing to a close, ushering in a current of scorching weather during the days, and thunderstorms that light up the humid nights. It’s a bittersweet moment. One that brings with it the long repose I’ve been needing since picking up undergraduate lectures in January, but also means leaving the close-knit community I’ve grown used to seeing every day for the past two weeks. As I write this post, there are two classes left to the intensive blogging course I’d signed up for this summer, and by the time this goes live, it’ll long be over.
I had registered for the course after struggling to plan the new direction I wanted to take the blog. Up until now, I’d been teaching myself how to manage a blog, what needed to be done to build a blog, and how to work with WordPress. I’d scour the internet researching how others went about running their own blogs, and, as I mentioned in a previous post, came up with hundreds of results with similar styles and voices—all selling courses about starting your blog but sharing the same information found on another.
In a sea of beiges, golds, light pinks, and whites, I worried about the copy-paste method most blogs used, and feared the only way to create a successful blog meant I needed to write and do as they did. After all, if it’s working, it must be for a reason. However, the idea of being disingenuous and anything but myself felt wrong and made writing anything difficult. I was neither a travel blogger, nor an author blog, and yet every new result suggested I pick one of the two niches and compete with the others in the field. But what happens when you’re someone who uses the details of your best friend’s road trip across the Yukon and the Northwest Territories to provide depth to the fictional world you’ve built in a novel? Is that not a niche of its own? Writers who experience the world and find tales in the ruins of civilisations?
Sitting on the back porch, studying under a professional journalist with a PhD, and joined in the Zoom meetings by others with the same interest in running a blog—some experienced with viral posts, and others having never written a blog post before—, became a welcomed change of pace. Our afternoons were spent providing feedback and discussing online journalistic issues, accompanied by an ice coffee or a cup of tea.
Everyone brought something different to our “hangouts”, but all offered a reassuring sense of safety and encouragement. Creating a space for our voices to be heard, and acknowledging we all could and wanted to deviate from the generic voices heard online. We identified the problems with some of the narratives we found and challenged them. Like the travelling spiritualist who’d spotted the shallowness of spiritual gurus and bloggers that capitalised and whitewashed various spiritual practices. Or the men in our class who pointed our the lack of voices and representation around men’s issues concerning healthy relationships, mental illnesses, and living life as an adult on the autism spectrum.
In an online class of eight people, we made room for each other, listened to one another, and supported everyone in their blogging journey. It was our equivalent of grabbing coffee with friends.
Surrounded by others who shared their personal experiences and highlighted issues that mattered to them, I felt reassured about straying from the blogging template found online, and writing as myself. There’s still the issue of marketing myself. Even if I’m equipped with the tools, I’ve yet to develop the courage to break from my introverted tendencies and say, “Screw it, I’m sharing online!”, but, with time, it’ll come.
