What the fuck should I blog about?
UPDATE: Here’s something I read in a collection of Susan Sontag’s notebooks, Reborn, that feels pertinent—
“I cannot write until I find my ego. The only kind of writer [I] could be is the kind who exposes himself.”
“What could I write a blog about?” Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams) asks her husband in Nora Ephron’s film Julie & Julia (yes, I know it was loosely based on Powell’s memoir, but I never read it). Her husband offers a few ideas that Julie immediately shuts down, and he ultimately suggests that she write about something she’s passionate about.
Julie Powell (played by Amy Adams) writing a blog post on her laptop.
She settles on cooking, specifically learning how to cook from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Julie achieves mild fame, a collection of fans, and becomes a narcissistic monster who equates being a writer (what Julie says she wants to do throughout her portions of the film) with being famous. “What do you think a blog is? It’s me, me, me day after day,” Julie yells at her husband before he storms out of their apartment, angry that his wife’s blog had become more important than their marriage.
Julie & her husband enjoying cooking.
I’ve heard before that you should blog about your passions, about something you can call yourself an expert in. I need to carve out a niche for myself on the internet in order to drive traffic to my content. And then maybe—just maybe—that niche will fill a void in 1,000+ readers’ lives. Finding my niche is what I struggle with.
It’s not that I don’t have any passions; I’m passionate about a lot of things. Or, rather, I’m interested. Interested is probably a better word. But I’m not an expert in anything. I’m in a perpetual state of learning—always the student, never the teacher. Maybe I’m putting too much emphasis on finding my niche. Can I really not write anything until I find it?
My first blog post on this site is about the struggles I’ve had with writing over the years, specifically with even calling myself a writer. Like Julie Powell, I suppose I’ve been afraid to really apply myself to the work. It’s scary to sit down and write for hours. It’s scary not to know what you’re going to write or how you’re going to approach a story. It’s easier to just not prioritize writing right now.
I keep myself from writing and publishing because I don’t know what to write. I’m on a quest to find what I should be writing about, which doesn’t leave much space for actual writing. I don’t like this way of thinking. It tends to make me jealous rather than appreciative of other people’s work. I’ll read a book, blog, newsletter that I love and curse myself for not having that idea myself. But what I’m really cursing myself for is that these writers have written and I have not. I’m still searching for what to write.
Do I really need to search for what the fuck I should be blogging about? Does a blog have to be about anything other than what I feel like writing about day to day? This is all to say that I guess I don’t give a fuck about what I blog about. No, that’s not it. It’s that I don’t need to search for something to write about. I have all that I could want to write about within and around me.