Giving Back

Posted by to tutorial on Saturday May 15, 2004.
Here is its permanent location

Since I am widely regarded by my peers as a pioneer of the blog-based microfiction genre, I naturally get a lot of e-mails from people asking me about my method for writing blog posts. A typical e-mail might read: Adam, you should put up a tutorial on how to blog like you!

Well, here goes.

First, I have to say that there is no one single method for writing on a blog. All I can do is give you my method. The best way to learn is to just do it yourself, and develop your own style and unique voice. My goal here is to just show you the rough path that I follow (well, pioneer), and hope that it leads you to one of those a-ha! moments, and from then on you take it in new, exciting directions. Just dont forget me when youre a famous A-list blogger ;-)

For this tutorial, Im going to take a sentence from one of my blog posts, and take you step-by-step through the different stages I went through to write it. Youll see all the mistakes I made, and, hopefully, how I learned from them.

Well be working with this sentence, which you may remember from The Laslow Motor:

In San Francisco, a power plant worker noticed that if he approached the Laslow motor from a certain angle, part of it appeared to be upside down.

Step 1. Inspiration

The first thing I did with this sentence was sketch out what I want to say. The goal at this stage is just to put words on paper and get the juices flowing. Sometimes Ill work for hours with no idea of what the sentence is going to say, and other times Ill get it dead on after just a few tries. Youre saying: but Adam, that doesnt look anything like a sentence! Patience, grasshopper!

Notice that Im using pencil here. People get too caught up on tools, but for the curious, I happen to use a Bic #2 0.7mm mechanical pencil on 20lb A4 printing paper. A lot of people like to use lined paper for that I recommend college-ruled over wide-ruled, but it ultimately comes down to personal preference.

Step 2. Perspiration

Next I take my sketches and rough out a few prototypes in Notepad. From these, I select the best one. How do I know which one is best? Im not telling! Thats the part I want you to figure out for yourself. Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo…

Notice that these look a bit more like a finished sentence, but were not ready for prime time yet. After Ive picked the sentence Im going to go with, I still have to apply capitalization, punctuation, and add the finishing touches.

Step 3. Gilding the Lily

Remember all those English classes you slept through in high school? Well, this is where youre gonna wish youd taken notes turns out there is a use for that stuff!

Basically, this step is all about fine-tuning the piece so that it meets the syntactic and orthographic rules of standard American English. Here is where art meets science. Some people consider this step optional, but believe me, it is where the true craftsman is separated from the rank amateur.

Note the revision notes. They help me remember all the changes I’ve made to a sentence, so that I can always go back to a previous version. Let’s say I decide I didn’t want that second comma in there after all: all I have to do is consult my notes, and I’m back to square one.

Step 4. The Proof is In the Pudding

Almost there! Now, we take our rough draft and give it some pizzazz. I use a program called Microsoft Word for this step. Word lets me make changes to how the sentence looks, without actually publishing it to the web. I can play around with different letter sizes, italicize or bold-face certain words, and even change the font. For this sentence, I ultimately decided to leave well enough alone but I make it a point to let my creative spirit roam free during this step, and I like to try out a lot of different things just to make sure I’m thinking outside the box.

Another good thing about Word is that it lets you apply some special filters to the sentence. One filter I like to use is spell check, which will highlight words that I have spelled incorrectly. This is a huge time-saver, compared to looking up each word separately in a dictionary (though that works fine too). Notice how Word catches my mistake here?

Step 5. Publish or Perish

The final step is to paste my sentence into Movable Type. Youll want to put it right after the sentence that preceeds it logically, and directly before the sentence it sets up. Its OK if you dont have a preceding sentence (that means you just started writing), or a following sentence (you can write that later). To get around this problem, I use “place-holder” sentences to fill in the space until I can write more sentences.

Heres how the finished sentence looks in MovableType:

Step 6. Back to the Drawing Board

Now that weve got one sentence out of the way, its time to write our next one. Oh, sorry, you thought you were done? Nope! A blog entry can contain hundreds of sentences. Thats why it can take anywhere from days to months for me to post one.

With any luck, what Ive accomplished here is a demystification of the writing process. I also hope Ive given you a basic tool set for making some sentences of your own. Remember that, while the era of discovery and exploration in blogging may be over (thanks to me and other pioneers like me), there is still a lot of thankless grunt work to be done. Thats where you come in.

Now, go forth and blog!

Yours,

Adam
May 16, 2005
Seattle

PS—A lot of you have been e-mailing me about my methods for creating this tutorial. I will try to work on a guide to creating your own tutorials, and have it posted here in a few months.