We've all heard the platitude that you need to have passion if you want to succeed at writing, and until recently, a platitude was all it was to me. Sure, I paid it lip service and played a good game with regards to it, but I never truly understood it as it relates to what we do. However, that has recently changed, and it took a secondary project for me to get it.
I'm a parent, and my children do some crazy things. Most of my friends are also parents, and our children all seem to be in the same age ranges. Those children also do some crazy things, and I thought it would be fun for a group of us to blog about situations we never thought we'd find ourselves in(like the time I fished a heart shaped locket out of a turd filled toilet for my daughter). There were seven of us, and we set up a blogging rotation where each of us had a day to blog. The blog's name is Once Upon a Potty, and I never figured it would be difficult to keep current. After all, I do three posts a week here, and most are much more involved than anything I pictured for what was supposed to be a fun parenting story site.
Yet it has fallen to the wayside.
Blogging on the site became something of a chore. Further, for the other parents, they put up the occasional post, but it never garnered the same passion with which we discussed our stories with each other. And it seems like it was due to our lack of overall interest.
Now don't get me wrong - none of us lacks interest in our kids, and we still love talking to each other about the bizarre things our kids do(things I know any parent out there could relate to). However, putting it into blog form never took off, maybe because we were busy living it and were drained before we could blog about any of it.
With my writing, on the other hand, it's a passion that I feel the urge to discuss with random strangers. Further, the act of blogging is a form of writing in itself, whereas parenting isn't done over the Internet. I love doing both with equal passion, but they require different things. Since I find blogging to be an outlet for my obsession with writing, it's not hard to do it on a regular basis. Relating stories about my kids is just something I do with friends, and posting about it doesn't hold the same appeal.
That's how I realized the difference between the platitude of passion for a topic and what true passion for that topic is. In our writing, we have to be passionate about it in order to stay with it. Find an outlet for what you love or else it'll go the way of my other website - mostly abandoned and worked on only when I feel like it(which I usually don't).
I'm a parent, and my children do some crazy things. Most of my friends are also parents, and our children all seem to be in the same age ranges. Those children also do some crazy things, and I thought it would be fun for a group of us to blog about situations we never thought we'd find ourselves in(like the time I fished a heart shaped locket out of a turd filled toilet for my daughter). There were seven of us, and we set up a blogging rotation where each of us had a day to blog. The blog's name is Once Upon a Potty, and I never figured it would be difficult to keep current. After all, I do three posts a week here, and most are much more involved than anything I pictured for what was supposed to be a fun parenting story site.
Yet it has fallen to the wayside.
Blogging on the site became something of a chore. Further, for the other parents, they put up the occasional post, but it never garnered the same passion with which we discussed our stories with each other. And it seems like it was due to our lack of overall interest.
Now don't get me wrong - none of us lacks interest in our kids, and we still love talking to each other about the bizarre things our kids do(things I know any parent out there could relate to). However, putting it into blog form never took off, maybe because we were busy living it and were drained before we could blog about any of it.
With my writing, on the other hand, it's a passion that I feel the urge to discuss with random strangers. Further, the act of blogging is a form of writing in itself, whereas parenting isn't done over the Internet. I love doing both with equal passion, but they require different things. Since I find blogging to be an outlet for my obsession with writing, it's not hard to do it on a regular basis. Relating stories about my kids is just something I do with friends, and posting about it doesn't hold the same appeal.
That's how I realized the difference between the platitude of passion for a topic and what true passion for that topic is. In our writing, we have to be passionate about it in order to stay with it. Find an outlet for what you love or else it'll go the way of my other website - mostly abandoned and worked on only when I feel like it(which I usually don't).
(Have passion for what you do, no matter how bizarre it might seem)
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