Planning is not creativity. So which is more important to your blog?
All the best blogging advice assures us that the way to success involves a lot of astute planning. Schedule your posts, focus on your niche, manage your time, be consistent, and plan out all the incremental steps you’re going to take on your path towards world-domination. I’ve spent the past month or so setting myself up here on self-hosted wordpress and trying to plan my blog so that it’ll go great guns and do well. I’ve got an excellent plan drawn up in a notebook, with smart and strategic ideas for about 20 posts, and various goals identified so that I can measure my success.
Many a problogger would nod sagely, and congratulate me on taking their advice (they might even offer me a premium product I might like to pay for, since I’ve found their free stuff such good value).
Problem? I can’t bear to write any of these planned posts. I’ve managed to plan all my creativity, inspiration, and off-the-wall-daft-tangential thinking out of the enterprise. I’m left with a pretty viable action plan… that I find boring, flat, business-like, and dead. I killed my baby.
In me, this always happens. Planning kills everything I’ve got; all the wild flowing juices, the lightbulb moments, the razzmatazz, the sexy hip-swing of inspiration. It used to happen back in my university days, when we had to submit plans of our essays and dissertations – I used to draw up the plan after I’d written the essay, because there sure as hell wasn’t one to show before or during the writing process. It happens now, as I study Creative Writing, when our tutors recommend we plan out our stories or our budding novels. Plan schpam, that’s what I think. If I already knew my story well enough to plan it, I wouldn’t need to bother writing it, would I?
If I put this into pictures, I end up out on the trail again. With any goal, the bigger the plans, the smaller and more inadequate I become. I shrink to a stick-man (woman), perched on the very first pebble at the base of a mountain range. I want to bag me some peaks, I can visualise the magnificence up there, and I’ve got a really good plan to get myself up there. But the plan involves very logical step-by-step climbing, following the map, and rationing my supplies. No hip-swinging is involved, no indulgence, no one-off flights of fancy. Plus, a stick-man (woman) has teeny-wee short-arse legs.
Stick-me suffers ambition-paralysis, and goes and does something else. ‘I think I’ll just see what’s new on my Google Reader…’, or ‘I wonder if there’s anything good on telly.’
This is a shame. Creativity could’ve launched me most of the way up there in one momentary rush. It might fly me, or bounce me, levitate me, teleport me, sweep me up on a breeze, or carry me up in the arms of a winged god. There could be all sorts of ways to get up there, and any one of which would be infinitely more exciting than the well-planned plod.
Creative space leaves me room for endless possibilities, whereas planning backs me in to a corner.
Enough of all the ’stick-man goes hill-walking’ analogies, what about applying all this to the nitty gritty of blogging success? I don’t know all the answers, I’m not a ‘blogging success.’ If you’re looking for authority on this matter I’m not your gal. I’m just the one with the questions.
Is it better to plan well, or to leave yourself open to the inefficient but sometimes mind-blowing vagaries of creativity? Creativity, and random tangents, don’t tend to fit well into a respectable Plan. So you do need to ask yourself, is the Plan important to your blogging? Why do you blog? What are you doing it for? Is it for the journey, or is it for the destination? While I do buy into the over-arching dreams of problogging (earning loads of money, working from home, not having a boss, escaping the 9-5, doing something I love), they’re not why I blog on the day to day basis. Just because I’ve entered a marathon, doesn’t mean that’s the only reason why I go out running 5 days a week. I go running because I love the daily experience of being out on the trail in and of itself. Really, I blog because I love to see what emerges out of all the half-formed ideas that I start off with.
Can I claim that the buzz of creativity is more of a thrill than a rising statcount of subscribers? No, I don’t think I can. If that were the case I wouldn’t even bother to put my writing out into the public world of the blogosphere, or read problogger advice on how to get more readers. But it is an equal sort of satisfaction. It’s not one that I could ignore for the sake of attracting many more readers searching for all my fabulous solution-focused running tips (that I can’t bear to write).
If you, like me, know what I’m talking about and have had trouble with Planning corrupting your Creative flow, I think its helpful to try a different mindset. Set aside the accepted wisdom of the pro-blogging genre, and consider alternatives. The big one for me involves a simple switch in vocabulary.
Make time. Do not make a timetable, do not draw up a timeline, ‘time management’ should be kept to a minimum. No-one creative dreams of being in management. Creative people want to make things, not manage things. That includes your time. All those time management tips and tools that are peddled in bookshops and productivity blogs – they are pulled together by the linear-thinking goal-focused trajectory types. They are great, and they do work, if that’s the way your brain ticks. But if you’ve got this far into my diatribe, and are relating to it, then recognise that you are probably different and ditch it.
Quit planning your blog/business, start creating it.
Stop managing your time, start making it.
Who knows where you might end up?
What do you reckon? Does planning too much stall your efforts? Is there enough room for your creative side in a well-planned, goal-focused blog? Is there a role for the unpredictable side of creativity, if your ultimate aim is to earn a living from your blogging enterprises? How do you combine both?
Image by Foxtongue
