blogging – Harmonia Philosophica

Free Blogging Advice (FBA) – Episode 5: Seek just one follower… Yourself!

Free Blogging Advice: Writing is hard. And easy. The goal of the Free Blogging Advice (FBA) series of short articles is to provide some free advice on… blogging! All you have to add is some time and effort. And love. Lots of love.

FBA Episodes

We all seek recognition. This is indeed one of our small human traits that it is difficult to get rid of. But we must get rid of it, if we are to grow as writers (and as humans).

The quest for recognition can lead the writer to end up writing for others, thus polluting his own original thoughts with the thoughts he/she believes others want to read. One never had followers, it is you that will be following your followers at the end…

One should focus on the only thing that is important for a writer/ blogger: To write original content.

One follower should suffice: You!

Write from your heart and just ask yourself: would you be following… You? If the answer is yes, then seek nothing more. You already have the best recognition you will ever need.

And sure, recognition by others may also come afterwards. But as a side effect and only because others will see and feel that you are not writing what they need to listen, but because they will read things only you could ever tell them.

Let the writer rise from within.

Ignore your readers.

Or else they will kill the writer you could be.

And within the millions of followers you will never listen to the desperate agony of your dying self…

Free Blogging Advice (FBA) – Episode 4: From whom are you writing?

FBA Episodes

There comes a time where any blogger wonders…

“Why am I doing this?”

This question can arise more than once in the beginning of your blogging endeavor and it will also come up later in time after you have established yourself as a known blogger. (or I would better say it SHOULD come up again after you have succeeded as a blogger – more on that later on)

Not being able to answer that simple question usually ends up in full demotivation and eventually to the end of your dream to become a blogger and share your ideas with the world.

But is there a right answer for that question?

Truth be told, there is not.

But there are many wrong ones.

Aristotle once very intuitively said that “the question contains the answer”…

This couldn’t be more applicable here.

Some say they are blogging for their followers…

That is so nice. Except that if you are writing for the ones who read you, then you will inevitably become just a puppet belonging fully to them. A writer does not care about who reads him. He (or she) simply writes whatever is in his head just… because! Creativity is a deeply irrational urge, not a calculative urge to gain more followers or retain the ones you have. Van Gogh only sold one painting while he was alive.

Some say that they are blogging to share knowledge…

Some say they are blogging because of other reasons…

That is the great trap though. That you need a reason to blog.

If blogging does not come from deep inside you, there is no reason you should be doing it in the first place. If you need a reason to blog, then you should stop right now. Because the moment that reason seizes to exist, that will be the moment when everything will look useless and futile. And a true writer never sees his (or her) work as futile or useless! Pure creation is never done under special conditions or within specific context. It just flows out from you.

Search within you.

Imagine yourself after many years blogging.

Having written thousands of posts.

With zero followers.

Zero page views.

Will you be happy?

Will you feel full?

Only you can answer that.

And when you answer this question you will understand.

Why everyone asking “Whom am I writing for?” is simply trying to find a reason not to…

Free Blogging Advice: Embrace imperfection!

FBA Episodes

One of the things bloggers find difficult to cope with, is the fact that their site is not perfect.

Most of us are perfectionists, especially when it comes to the child of our creativity. Our site should be flawless, full of perfect articles, with embedded perfect pictures, saying perfect things.

The truth is much more different than that though.

Every human is imperfect. We constantly change and grow, we learn and forget, we are literally a new person every passing second as Harmonia Philosophica has explained more than once in various philosophical contexts.

How do you expect your blog to be perfect?

Being perfect was never the goal in the first place.

The goal is to expose your thoughts to the cosmos. To let out your thoughts and give others the opportunity to get to know them. Perhaps even reply back and establish a community wandering about the same things.

A blog is a window that exposes your soul to the world.

Trying to believe that what others see through that window needs to be perfect is simply a denial of your very nature. No matter how much you try to make things perfect, there will always be things that could be done better, small spelling mistakes, broken links or missing images.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that you must not do your best to have a perfect site. I am just emphasizing the fact that if this is the first and only thing you care about you will indeed have a perfect unpublished site…

Blogging is about letting go.

Blogging is about having fun.

And who can have fun while trying to play everything to perfection?

Experiment!

Write!

Love what you do!

Your blog will ALWAYS be imperfect!

That is what makes is so perfect…

Harmonia Philosophical is dead. Long live Harmonia Philosophica!

Photo by Spiros Kakos (Kakia Lagada, Kythera)

Harmonia Philosophica exists for more than a decade now. There has been many years since it had a major revamp, but the time had finally come.

And just like that, everything changed.

New template that is more lean and modern. The old template was an old favourite one, but all things die at some point.

(And that adds more to the love we have for them)

New type of posts. From now on the articles will be of a more poetic type without any specific link to a news or scientific discovery article that they comments on. Anyway we had always been advocates of the irrational, so why stick to writing articles about something in such an ordinary way? (Of course posts already scheduled will be posted as scheduled)

(What is the point of writing with logic if you are to sound logical?)

Every moment all things change.

Every moment we change.

And yet, we stay the same.

There is nothing closer to eternity than the ephemeral…

Harmonia Philosophica is dead!

Long live Harmonia Philosophica!

Free Blogging Advice (FBA) – Episode 3: Develop your story.

FBA Episodes

Now that we have decided to start writing (see previous episodes), we need to develop the story of our site.

Story: The narrative that describes the intent of your blog. The story will explain to the visitor why he or she is here, what they should expect to read and what the blog will offer them.

You need to publish the story in your About page. In that way you will establish the identity of your site for anyone to see.

But what should a story look like? First of all it needs to be simple. If you do not have it clear in your head then your readers will be confused as well (and most probably will not come back to you site).

Secondly, it needs to be emotional. Emotions is what drive the world around and you need to invest in the emotions of your readers to capture their interest.

Last but not least, your story needs to be a… story! What I mean by this is that you need to convey your message to your readers through an actual story, i.e. an anecdote, a tale that will have a hero, a problem that her or she needs to overcome, a climax and a resolution. This is easier said than done. But you need the story element in order to reach to your readers with a compelling and attractive way. Just stating what your site is about is not enough. If you just just wrote down the goal of your site like a corporate statement then it would look like a… corporate statement. You need more than that to engage with the visitor of your blog.

Stories captivated us when we were children. And still do. Everyone likes a good story. It is more probable to remember something that you heard in a story than something you just read.

As an example you can read the story of Harmonia Philosophica here. It is a short one, as a story for a site must be. And it tries to convey the message of this site, i.e. that being irrational and non-thinking is the best way to think.

Whether you like it or not is another story…

To be continued…