8
Stories of Everyday Life
One of the gifts of being a writer … is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.
—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Whether your blog is about living a green lifestyle or maintaining a rooftop garden, raising kids as a lesbian mom or rescuing dogs and stray cats as a good Samaritan, there’s a good chance a huge slice of your work will be generated from your everyday experiences.
The key is to spot the experiences that matter, to train yourself to recognize a good story and give it shape.
That takes practice, but it’s also fun. Life’s a lot richer when you pay close attention to what’s unfolding around you. Or, to quote Lamott again, “We are a species that knows and wants to understand who we are.”
Find Universal Connections
Look around more. Or let your imagination roam. If you do, you’ll find that daily life is neither mundane nor routine. It’s filled with surprises.
Your past can teach you that. Remember the time you got nabbed as a kid for stealing candy? The time your mother tried to teach you the facts of life? The first time you beat your dad in a race? These aren’t just passages; they are stories. By sharing them and more contemporary personal tales—some no bigger than a conversation— you, the writer, can strike a universal chord. This is not summoned through incantation. It’s just a fancy phrase for a sense of connection, a way that readers can engage in your life and experiences by filtering them through the prism of their own. Think of it as blogging’s version of swapping stories at the bar or coffee shop. Most of us got nabbed as kids with our hand in someone else’s candy jar. We all had to learn the facts of life from someone, as embarrassing as it seemed at the time.
Author Jerry Lanson came to understand the power of universal connections in the 1990s when he wrote a column called Muddling Through Midlife for the Syracuse, New York, Post-Standard. In it, he recounted tales about daily life as a dad, husband, and 40-something guy losing hair, teeth, and memory.
Jerry still has a passion for writing such little stories, but today he writes blog posts. He, his family members, and his dog Murphy often serve as the characters in his pieces for The Huffington Post.
One day, for example, his granddaughter Devon, then 6, announced her plans to seek higher office, which Jerry turned into a short post titled “A 6-Year-Old Launches Her Political Career.” It went like this:
As I was driving my granddaughter Devon home from first grade on Friday, the subject turned to politics.
“Ada,” she said, using the name she invented for me about as early as she could speak. “I would like to be president.”
“You’re not old enough,” I replied.
“Do I have to be 10?” she asked.
“No, a little bit older.”
I refrained from telling her that given the current political climate, she had to either be crazy or a closet member of the Tea Party to even consider running for president. I had to know which.
“Why do you want to be president?” I asked.
“So that I could tell people what to do,” Devon replied.
I didn’t want to crush her dream.
“I’m not sure it actually works that way,” I told her. “What would you tell them?”
“The first thing I’d do is give everyone recess for the entire day,” Devon said.
“Congress has already done that,” I muttered under my breath. “Maybe you should run for the House of Representatives.”
But this was Devon’s show.
“What else would you do?” I asked.
“I would take naps.”
“But who would run the country?”
“I would tell my assistants to do that,” she said.
Clearly she’s a George W. Bush Republican in the inner circle of a family of liberal Democrats. Still, I’ll vote for her. She’s too delicious to turn down.
If five-minute conversations can be fodder for a story about everyday life, just about anything can. But it takes practice—and an under standing of the difference between self-indulgent rambling and story.
As the humorist, novelist, and one-time journalist Mark Twain said, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
Every story has a point, even the smallest vignette. Every story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sympathetic (and funny) characters help a lot, too. In this case, the point—the universal connector—was nothing more than a play off the funny things that kids say (who hasn’t known a kid who at some point announced plans to run for president?). Just as it can be amusing to eavesdrop on a conversation between kids and their parents at the beach, it can be amusing to read about similar conversations in a blog.
But the writer first has to register them. Writers should always be on high alert to what’s going on around them. Writing about everyday life first requires watching, listening, recognizing what makes you curious, and recreating on the page what makes you smile—or squirm. It’s a reason writers “gather string,” jot notes on their phones, tablets, or pads about what catches their eye or ear.
Writing about everyday life does not mean looking in the mirror and telling the world why you look so good in red or what you think is cool today. It’s an exercise in sharing honest experience, not ego or narcissism.
Bridgette White understands this. She tapped a deep vein with Huffington Post readers when she wrote about a family outing at the beach and a conversation with her kids that changed her self-perception about the way she looked. Titled “Exposed by My Children for What I Really Look Like,” her post went viral. It was shared more than 25,000 times, drew 200,000 likes, and attracted hundreds of comments. She had struck that universal chord, as was obvious from the words that many wrote.
“Thank you so much for this article,” wrote one mom. “… Yes, I know I’m overweight. But if it bothers someone else, then it isn’t necessarily my problem but rather theirs.”
Roshni Chintalapati
“You have to find your own writing style or else your words don’t ring true”
Roshni Chintalapati writes about everyday life: her own as an Indian American Mom, the blog’s name. Chintalapati, who lives with her family in San Diego, California, started the blog in mid-2012. She writes this to the site’s visitors: “If you have ever wanted to know how an Indian American household functions; how Indian Americans bring up their kids; what festivals Indian Americans celebrate; what Indian Americans eat; why Indian Americans move about so weirdly every time a Bollywood number starts playing; this site may be able to answer these questions (regarding the last one though; it’s just genetics!)”
Roshni Chintalapati
The blog’s subtitle is “Juggling two rich cultures through life and parenthood.”
Chintalapati’s blog caught the authors’ interest because her words and their cadence carry her personality and sense of humor. The blog, in short, is a good read. Chintalapati answered a series of questions by email.
Why do you blog?
I enjoy writing and interacting with the blogging community. I used to read blogs on a daily basis and once the urge to contribute hit me, I set up my site. It’s nice to be a reader and commenter, but of course, most of us also want to voice our own ideas and pretend that other people care about our opinion.
What are the challenges of balancing a job, two kids, a husband, and a blog?
Obviously in that list a blog is and should be the last priority. So, the challenge of maintaining a blog that you are serious about is to keep to a regular posting schedule. Of course, nowadays, social media presence and interaction [are] key to blog promotion; no one just posts articles and sits back any more. So, the challenge of being always present and ready to chat on social media is there. Frankly, I can’t and don’t have the luxury of time for that; I do the minimal and leave it at that!
Is it at all difficult to keep your blog fresh? How often do you post?
Because I’ve worked out the topics of my blog very clearly, I don’t have too much trouble in figuring out what to post. My theme is the Indian American lifestyle, perspective of a mom, a parent, an Indian American parent, and, finally, posts about my childhood and my extended Indian family. It’s specific enough to keep my readers interested, yet broad enough to give me a wide range of subjects to blog about. I try to post once a week, though there have been times where I haven’t been able to hammer out a post because life gets in the way.
Has the nature of your blog changed at all over time?
Yes indeed! It started out as a mommy blog, but I expanded my topics a lot shortly after.
When you began blogging, had you done much writing before?
I always loved to write. I used to keep journals, I loved writing essays in school, and I wrote for my college magazine. I didn’t really take writing very seriously, though, since I was pursuing a science degree.
Clearly, you are a reader. You mention that in your biography. Do you believe that has helped you as a writer? Why?
Yes and no. By that I mean, I definitely am enriched by the wide variety of thoughts and writing styles to which I have been exposed as a reader. But, ultimately, you have to find your own writing style or else your words don’t ring true. For instance, I love P.G. Wodehouse and I used to write articles in his style; but I quickly understood that only Wodehouse can and should write like Wodehouse.
How did you find your voice as a blogger? Do you think of your blog as a letter to yourself? To friends? Do you have any audience in mind or simply enjoy telling stories?
If I wrote with someone in mind, it would definitely hinder me from expressing myself freely. Some of my articles, like my post on bedwetting (www.indianamericanmom.com/2013/08/bed-wetting-older-kids.html), were quite unnerving to write, but I thought of someone whom I didn’t know but who would derive some comfort on reading that article, and so I wrote and posted it! For other posts, like about my family, my grandmother, I wanted to have a written record of the so many endearing and amazing things that they had done, and so I posted those for myself to read over and over again. Finally, there are subjects that I am passionate about, like my post on rape (www.indianamericanmom.com/2013/01/she-was-asking-for-131it.html), and I posted my frank views on it without any regard to how others might view it. So, ultimately, you should write for yourself; that’s when you can be your most authentic.
What advice would you offer a young blogger who wants to get started?
I learned that it is true that content is king. Sometimes, it feels like many blogs become big over a post that went viral or because these bloggers have thousands of Facebook followers. I agree that there are many wonderful blogs that deserve such recognition. But the blogs that endure are the ones that have a loyal band of readers because it is the writing that draws them back again and again.
Start Small and Specific
Bridgette White’s story, like Jerry’s, grew out of an interaction with children. But hers was anything but light-hearted. Instead, her conversations with her son and then daughter gave her a new lens and new courage through which to look at the issues of weight and body image, issues with which nearly everyone grapples. The story grew out of a single photo of her lying on her back at the beach.
My first reaction is shock. Who took this hideous picture of me?
Self-loathing and disgust [well] up and threaten to bring me to tears.
Just as I am about to hit “delete,” my boy walks in the room.
“Do you know anything about this picture?” I ask him.
I turn the screen so he can see it. He smiles huge.
“I took that of you in [Lake] Tahoe,” he says. “You looked so beautiful lying there. I couldn’t help it Mom.”
“You need to ask me before using my phone to take pictures,” I say.
“I know,” he says. “But Mom, seriously, look how pretty you look.”
…
I still see my dimply fat thighs.
I also see a mom collapsed on the shore who just explored the lake for hours with her children.
I see chubby arms.
I also see the arms of a mom who just helped her kids across the rocks and hot sand so their feet wouldn’t hurt.
I see a fat woman wearing a black dress bathing suit to try to hide her weight issue.
I also see an adventurous mom who loves her children something fierce.
White has established a tension here: this mom is at best ambivalent about her body. But as the post continues, her conversations with her children help her resolve her self-doubt and make peace with the picture and herself. She ends her piece like this:
I don’t hate my body anymore.
That’s huge for me to admit, and hard to even wrap my mind around.
I’m not giving up on exercising and getting healthy … Right now, though, I just want to love my body where it is. I want to be OK to see myself the way my kids do.
Thank you, kids.
The simplicity and honesty of White’s story are why it works so well. Built off one picture and an exchange with her kids, it says much more. Blog posts can be like that. They can examine big issues of day-to-day life—in this case, weight, body image, and the impact of both in a culture that venerates youth and shapeliness. But to take on those big issues effectively, to touch readers, they need to approach those issues in small, specific, and human terms.
It’s essential to establish a story’s point and place before expanding its purpose. Save preachy for the Sunday pews.
Inventory Your Own Life
Those who blog about everyday life can find stories with impact by simply paying attention to what they’re doing, thinking, and saying.
As we noted in Chapter 3, “Getting Started,” story ideas come from lots of places. Blogs on politics, economics, the media, and public affairs often come from monitoring the Web, social media, public records, and other written sources used to find angles that others haven’t tapped. Writing about everyday life is different. It demands living in the present and tuning into it with heightened alertness. It means noticing what’s around you, what’s changed. It means thinking about who is affected by actions and how. And it means changing routines, going places at different times of day, walking places you haven’t walked, taking public transportation if you usually drive.
“Inventorying the obvious” is how Jerry describes it in his book, Writing and Reporting the News. It works in newsrooms, too. Once, when he lived in California and worked as a newspaper editor, Jerry found his home overrun by ants. Rather than writing a personal blog about it—this was the 1990s—he asked a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News to make a call. Was this a widespread problem in the region? It was. The story made Page 1.
On your own blog, you are Page 1. You call the shots. The story needn’t be big and widespread. Interesting and personal will do.
Serendipity often plays a part. So again, be alert. Just yesterday, for example, Jerry drove to his daughter’s house in Woburn, Massachusetts. On the way back—once again with Devon—there was a traffic jam and commotion on Route 38, in front of Stop & Shop right before a rotary at the entrance to Route 128. People were standing on the median, leaning forward, their cellphones out to take pictures. Cars waited patiently. As in the famous children’s story, Make Way for Ducklings, a parade of winged animals was crossing the road. Only these were geese—nine of them—who, oh-so-slowly, marched across the six lanes in single file. It was a cute moment that surely had the makings of a blog, with photo, had Jerry not been intent on writing this chapter.
Perhaps he’d have started with something like: “Forget those cute ducklings in Boston’s Public Garden. In my neighborhood, geese rule the roads.”
The lede, after all, doesn’t have to tell the whole story. It only has to get the reader to the next paragraph.
Enlist Example as the Seed of Stories
Here’s a way to find stories: ask yourself when you get home each day what the day’s biggest “holy mackerel” moment was. How would you finish this beginning: “Hey, you’ll never guess what happened to me this afternoon.” Those kind of personal “headlines,” small, specific moments in the day, often point the way to a blog post.
Jerry’s wife Kathy, for example, was sitting on their patio in their busy Boston suburb a few summers back when a red fox trotted by just a few feet away. It was the kind of moment that would be the “talker” with anyone Kathy met that day. It certainly surprised Jerry.
In this case, after a few phone calls, he wrote a Huffington Post blog titled “When Life in the Suburbs Gets Wild.” It began like this:
Perhaps she hunts by bankers’ hours, the red fox who lives in our neighborhood. Or maybe her kids are growing up fast, demanding more to eat.
The first time we saw her close up, several weeks ago, we were eating breakfast on the patio between our garage and house at about 9:30 a.m. She loped down the street, perhaps 30 feet away, straight toward Massachusetts Avenue, the main road of our historic, Revolutionary War village. Not a care in the world.
Then, on Father’s Day, Kathy was sitting on the same patio, talking on the phone to her mother at 5:25 p.m., when the fox emerged from the shadows behind the garage, not 5 feet away. It walked another 10 feet to the lilac bush, stopped, turned and stared, not hurried, apparently not the least bit afraid. Kathy sort of was. She raced into the house, slammed the screen and blurted out the news.
Instead of cat and mouse, we’ve been playing fox and man of late in our neighborhood. Or, occasionally, coyote and golden retriever.
Unlike the fox, the coyote doesn’t dally. He raced by at 10:30 a.m. sometime last week while I was walking our dog Murphy on a dirt connecting road on the hill behind our house … Our most haunting neighborhood addition has yet to show its face. That’s the fisher, sometimes erroneously called the fisher cat. Late at night, three times last week alone, we’ve been awakened by its screech, something akin to the sound of two cats fighting in an alley or a ghoul cornered by the Ghostbusters. It’s enough to make me pull the covers just a bit closer.
Unlike Devon’s run for the White House, this story needed some explanation. Why all the wild animals? So Jerry called Lexington’s animal control officer, Stephanie Doucett, for her thoughts.
“We’ve had wildlife in the neighborhoods for a long time,” said Doucette, who has been on the job more than seven years. “They just do their own thing.”
She told him one fox family with five babies lived two blocks from his house.
So what should he and other residents do about it? A state wildlife education official offered tips on how to scare off wildlife and discourage them from prowling; useful information for readers elsewhere, too.
“Their first response is flight, not fight,” said Marion Larson, chief of information and education for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries & Wildlife. But she added, it doesn’t hurt to show them who’s boss. (“My mother is over 70 and she yells at bears,” she said.) That might mean “whooping it up” to scare the animals away, turning on bright lights or throwing something at them. Preferably—and this is my suggestion—from behind a very large fence.
Jerry’s piece linked to the website of Larson’s agency, which had a list of further advice for dealing with wild animals. There are two more lessons here: small stories about everyday life still can involve reporting and still can allow readers to learn something new.
A Little Humor Goes a Long Way
Make me smile and you’ll make me your reader for a long while. Most funny things take but seconds to deliver. Don’t prolong them needlessly.
Kelcey Kintner, a former journalist, author, and mother, keeps an active blog called The Mama Bird Diaries. She’s from Florida and, as she explains, “drives a used gold minivan because you can’t fit five kids on a Vespa.”
Her blog, filled with advice, is casual, colloquial, and often funny. Here’s an excerpt from a blog on breastfeeding titled “how to breastfeed (alternate title: this is not a wet T-shirt contest although you could totally win if it was).”
It takes a village to breastfeed. You need experts. Probably not your well-meaning noisy neighbor whose dog just had puppies so now she’s sure she knows all about nursing. You need people in your life that know stuff.
I had no natural instinct when it came to breastfeeding. I didn’t magically know how to properly get my baby to latch on. I didn’t know what to do when my breasts became the size of two gigantic honeydew melons. And you probably won’t either.
So utilize the lactation nurse at the hospital who can help you position yourself and your baby correctly.
Kintner sometimes tweets short-and-sweet posts, niblets really, on Twitter. Here’s one:
| 4-year-old: | I need Band-Aid. |
| Me: | Don’t have one. |
| 4-year-old: | I need a Band-Aid. Need A Band-Aid Now! |
| Me: | Oh, wait. I found one. |
| 4-year-old: | Not that one. |
“Life is so tragic and so serious. Humor is the escape.”
Kelcey Kintner began writing her humorous blog on marriage and motherhood, The Mama Bird Diaries, seven years ago. She’s written funny posts about changing her daughter’s name when she realized she didn’t like it, visiting Naples (Florida, not Italy), and something she called “emails in a marriage,” a way of showing how different the lives and minds of working dads and stay-at-home moms are.
Kelcey Kintner
We caught up with Kelcey, whose work is excerpted in this chapter, at her Florida home. She answered our questions by email.
How did you go about approaching your blog when you began? Was it a hobby? Or did you see it all along as a potential business?
I always viewed blogging as a part-time job (not a hobby), I guess because I went to journalism school and consider writing and journalism my profession. So I always viewed it as a way to potentially make money. I don’t remember exactly when it became profitable. But as my traffic grew, I was able to charge for ads, and it led to paid freelance writing opportunities.
Why did you start in the first place?
I had kids, didn’t want to work full-time and the freelance schedule is very unpredictable. I thought blogging was a great creative outlet and I just hoped I could make some money doing it.
To what extent do you write for yourself and to what extent for others?
I write for my readers. This is not a diary. I write hopefully funny posts that parents and others can relate to.
What do you see as your blog’s mission or focus, and how has that changed over time?
It’s always been a humor blog on parenting, marriage and pop culture. The focus hasn’t really changed. I just think I’ve become a better, sharper writer over time. At least I hope so!
How have you gone about building traffic to your blog?
Slow and steady. Through other blogs, freelance writing, social media like Twitter and Facebook and writing consistently.
We first saw your name on a compilation of short dialogues—tweet blogs for lack of another name—on Huffington Post. Do you periodically try your hand at these as well?
My goal is to tweet funny, relatable things that will be shared on Twitter and other outlets like The Huffington Post and Nick Mom.
Do you write your tweet blogs in part to draw traffic to your bigger blog or are they just quick and fun, or both?
I enjoy tweeting and it’s definitely fun. But my goal is to build my audience, which helps to attract sponsors and other money-making opportunities.
What in your mind makes a great blog on everyday life?
Something that is easy to relate to. Like I wrote a post about wearing the wrong thing to a shiva call [a visit to pay respect and give comfort during a mourning period in the Jewish religion]. Everyone can relate to wearing the wrong thing to an event. I also strive to make my writing concise. I hate longwinded blogs.
What advice would you offer a young blogger starting out with this kind of blog?
Be true to yourself. You have to find your own voice. And find some writers that you really admire that can take you under their wing.
How important in your mind is humor in connecting with your readers?
Life is so tragic and so serious. Humor is the escape. If you can make someone laugh, you have really given [that person] a gift. Readers have written to me that my blog got them through some horrible thing in their life and that is just amazing.
Use Dialogue
Conversations are a big part of everyday life. Yet reporters look for “quotes,” sentence- to paragraph-long comments meant to accentuate a point, give expert opinion, or add another voice.
Real people speak in dialogue, the give and take of conversation. Dialogue conveys action and interaction, and is a much more effective way of engaging readers in a scene. Here once more is where gathering string comes in—carrying a small audio recorder, your phone, a tablet, a pad—to record or get down the best such exchanges.
Dialogue needn’t merely anchor a story. It can be the story, as was the case with Kelcey Kintner’s tweet. Or it can be most of the story, as was the case in Jerry’s piece above about his granddaughter’s quest for the presidency.
To work, dialogue needs to be short, punchy, fast-paced, and, whenever possible, funny. Remember: Think of those stories you’d share with a friend that begin, “Hey, you wouldn’t believe what I overheard today.”
Here is an example from the New York Times blog, “Metropolitan Diary,” which captures snippets of New York in essays, dialogue exchanges, and poems. The pieces are not bylined.
At my West Village Pilates class last week.
Instructor: “What do you want to work on today?”
Me: “Abs.”
The woman on the mat to my left: “Stretching. My back is soooo sore.”
The woman on the mat to my right: “My butt.”
The woman to her right: “World peace.”
A pause.
The woman to my left: “O.K. Brunch.”
Everyone Has a Family
Just as we all can be characters in our own stories, so, too, can those who know us best—the members of our family. The influence of family goes a long way toward defining who we are. Like it or not, no one knows us better, and vice versa. And since just about everyone has a family, few topics provide a more natural bridge to readers than those that tie into family.
As always in writing, ground your story in specifics. Don’t just write stuff. Think small.
Let’s say, for example, that you wanted to write an essay for Father’s Day. You wouldn’t get far by launching into a bunch of generalities about “why I love my dad.”
My dad is the biggest, kindest and strongest man I know. He’s always there for me, and he’s the only person who can always make me smile in the worst of times. We share an interest in a variety of sports and both like to cook sometimes. We also both like animals. But what I like best about him is that we share a love for baseball. We go to games together, compare our favorite players, even keep batting averages.
So what’s the problem? The sentences are short enough. The individual sentences are clear. But they lack focus, example, and specificity. As the writing coaches at the journalism center, The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida like to ask: “What’s the point? Why should readers care?”
Start plotting your post by answering these two questions for yourself. Writing a good headline can help (see Chapter 6, “Why Headlines Matter”). Maybe the headline “Dad, Baseball and the Lessons of Life” would work. Or “Memories of Bonding at the Ballpark.” Whatever the answer, writing a headline will help you figure out where you are heading.
Next, when you write that first sentence, interest readers in something that shows your character or main point rather than merely tells about him or it. Let’s start over.
My Dad taught me the art of sneaking into the best empty box seats at Fenway Park when I was 5. He was born for the part. Dad was a distinguished-looking fellow, with a round, bald head and a rim of prematurely white hair around its fringe. Shortly after a game’s first inning ended, he’d scout the most expensive empty seats below, and, with newly purchased popcorn in hand, lead the way toward them with the air that they were his.
It was such adventures at the ballpark that forged our relationship, the reason, as Father’s Day approaches, that my memories always turn toward Fenway.
See the difference? The first paragraph establishes the theme. The second anchors it, gives what journalists call the nut graf, or so what graf—in this case, that baseball forged a relationship you still think of every Father’s Day.
The specifics here take no more space—and they say something much clearer, better grounded, and more universal. The story may move beyond baseball at some point, but if it’s a good story, it will come back to this original theme at the end. That’s what staying on topic or theme means.
As is the case with this Father’s Day piece, family stories often can be planned by keeping track of the calendar. Anniversaries give stories something of a news peg, a reason for being written when they are. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, the start of baseball season, graduation season, camp season, anniversaries, and birthdays are but some of the dates that might prompt a particular family story.
Family stories needn’t all be nice either. David Sedaris has built much of his career as a humorist writing about his largely dysfunctional family. And while most of what we read about moms on Mother’s Day keys on special memories of a special person, this story was distinctive because it took a decidedly different tack. It was written by blogger Lucy Ball.
The last time [my mom] hit me was when I was about 11 or 12. She swung at me. I had planned it in my mind over and over and I finally got the courage this time. I grabbed her wrist and stopped her arm mid-air. And I told her, “Don’t you ever lay a hand on me again. Ever.”
But there were many times when her words and behavior hurt people worse than her hand ever could. Like the day of my wedding.
So, sadly, this Mother’s Day I will not be filled with joy and admiration for my mother like a good daughter should be. I will not reminisce about the times when we played dress-up or she let me put on her makeup. If any of those things did happen, they were overshadowed by the traumatic memories and long since forgotten.
What I can do though is forgive her. She has changed. And the death of her own mother has awakened the sleeping elephants no one would talk about until now.
I can also tell others my shameful embarrassing story.
Not because I am ashamed of my mother, but to show others that the cycle can be broken.
But only when you stop ignoring the elephants. Find someone to talk to. Get help.
There is no shame. Let your elephants go.
Ball ends her BlogHer post not by thanking her mother, but by forgiving her.
Tighten the Focus of Your Everyday Life Blog
Too many blogs about everyday life try to cover just about everything and end up covering next to nothing. Don’t make that mistake.
When a family in Wiltshire, England, decided to start a blog together, it titled its effort Everyday Life on a Shoestring. It shared the family’s efforts to live frugally and green. That’s focus.
In contrast, a blog titled The Kitchen Sync, Thoughts on Work, Life, the Cloud and Other Topics—and this is real—needs to decide what it is about. The play on “sink” is nice, but the whirlwind of topics needs some boundaries.
Pick an aspect of your everyday life—the place in which you live, parenting, preparing for a marathon—and make it the topic of your blog.
Tracy Kaler, for example, writes a readable, multimedia blog about all things New York titled Tracy’s New York Life. It’s personal, conversational, and filled with pictures and graphics. She posts regularly, keeping her spotlight on her life in the city, from one entry about noisy neighbors to another about a graffiti tagger some consider an artist and others a vandal. Along the way, she passes on tips and advice.
The best blogs about daily life sometimes inspire book ideas, or, better yet, calls from publishers. Colin Beavan published his book, No Impact Man, in 2009, after spending a year blogging about his efforts to reduce his environmental impact on the planet to as close to zero as possible. He later ran as a Congressional candidate for the Green Party and has converted his blog into a voice for energy conservation.
Mason Currey’s story is the kind that should give bloggers encouragement as they begin posting in what is often a wilderness inhabited by only a few friends. In 2007, he began a blog called Daily Routines on the work habits of “artists, writers and other interesting people.” The blog is no more; it has become a book, titled Daily Rituals. Here is how Currey tells the story.
I launched Daily Routines on a Sunday afternoon in July 2007, while procrastinating on a writing assignment due the following day. It was intended as a hobby, and for the first year and a half I had a readership of about a dozen friends, coworkers, and family members.
Then, in December 2008, Slate wrote a story about the quest for the perfect morning routine that quoted liberally from my blog. Suddenly I went from having a record of five visitors in one day to almost 18,000, and more than 80,000 visitors for the month.
Along with all of these visitors came a steady stream of comments and emails—including a few e-mails from editors and literary agents suggesting that I turn the blog into a book. Two weeks after the Slate article came out, I signed on with one of those agents; over Christmas vacation, I wrote a book proposal. By April 2009, after lots of back-and-forth with several editors, I signed a contract with my dream publisher, Knopf.
Now, four years later, the Daily Routines book—officially titled Daily Rituals: How Artists Work—is finally coming out. It presents the routines and working habits of 161 creative minds.
We can all dream of such an opportunity. But first, sharpen your focus.
Discussion
- In small groups, discuss the difference between simply keeping a personal journal and telling stories about everyday life. How is it different to write only for ourselves and to write about everyday life for an audience? Within your groups, discuss whether any of you have either kept journals or blogged about everyday life before. What did you write about? How might your approach change after reading this chapter?
- Discuss the challenges of using dialogue in writing. Do you consider it more effective, less effective, or simply different from using quotations? Why? What skills do you believe you need to develop to introduce dialogue into your work?
Exercises
- Gather string for a week about your own life. At the end of each day, answer the question: “Would you believe what happened to me today?” Analyze these answers in small groups and decide whether and why some of the answers could be the basis of a story. What would that story need?
- Think of the quirkiest person in your extended family (every family has at least one). Write about that person, but not in general terms. Instead, write about a day, a visit, a memory. Try to convey the person’s character and personality by recreating a scene—an interaction, a conversation, a shared experience.