Douglas Adams once said:

Writing is easy – all you have to do is stare at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds.

Or, if you’re a blogger, you just steal ideas from other people and pretend that they’re your own. (there’s actually only one blogger in the whole world who produces original content, and he’s currently preparing for what will undoubtably be the biggest copyright infringement lawsuit the world has ever known) Unfortunately, tonight, even that old standby has produced no useful results, so I’m reduced to the Douglas Adams technique, although obviously slightly adapted to take into account advances in technology.

(Does anyone know how to get blood off an LCD screen? It’s kind of gone all smeary and yucky, and everything is an unpleasant sort of shade of rusty red)

The problem with real life is that it’s actually hugely, monstrously dull. Everyone’s life is actually, save for the odd detail here and there, exactly the same; we get up, we go to work, we come home, we eat, we sleep. The pattern repeats itself up and down the country, in millions of homes, offices, bars, supermarkets and cars, every day of every week. Therefore, short of actually being a celebrity or one of those few people who actually has a sufficiently unusual life as to be interesting, there are only three ways of writing a blog that will engage people’s attention on a more or less long-term basis.

Firstly, you can work out what the tiny differences are between your life and everyone elses, and somehow magnify them into something that will hold people’s attention. For example, it’s unlikely that any of my readers at the moment are currently also reading a theological book entitled “Postmodern Christianity”, which takes as its focus the creation of a so called “Inclusive Liberal Theology” by placing the development of Christianity into the context of the development of philosophical thought over time – and, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s late on a Sunday evening and therefore the thoughtful, philosophical part of my brain has shut down for the day, I’m sure it could form the basis of a fascinating, controversial and engaging post. Unfortunately, though, the only philosophical thoughts running through my brain at the moment are along the lines of “if I don’t get in my bed soon, will it cease to exist?”, and so deep thought isn’t about to happen here at the moment.

Secondly, you can use your incredible comedic talents and gifts of eloquence and insight to write about the day to day humdrum in a way which brings it to life, engages people and makes them laugh. On Friday, I waited half an hour for a bus which apparently runs every ten minutes. Lyle could probably have turned that into a four-page expletive filled rant on the state of Manchester’s public transport; I, however, am currently feeling relatively placid and unruffled by this, especially as it happened two days ago and, in the end, I wasn’t that late getting to the pub. Plus, I kind of get embarassed when I swear here; it’s just not the done thing for an Englishman, is it?

So, the third thing you can do is to whinge and moan at great length about how you’ve got nothing to write about, in the vain hope that people actually read most of the way through the post before they realise they’ve been duped. It’s a cheap trick – like authors who write “Little did he know that in 12 hours time, this knowledge would save his life” in order to artificially generate tension out of an otherwise tedious and humdrum scene – and of course, I’d never use it here. Well, not unless it was gone midnight on a Sunday and I was really, really desperate for ideas, that is.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2004 at 12:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.