As you know, peeps, I’m all pro-blogging: I regard it as a form of art, a platform for exchanging ideas and experiences. It gets you writing – regularly (hopefully). You learn about writing for an audience regardless of how big or small it is.
At the same time I completely understand writers’ hesitation to throw themselves at this medium. My main shared concern is: how much time does it need (and how much does it take away from other writing projects)?
That’s a fair enough worry. The way I see it is this: just because I’m working on a novel or short story this doesn’t mean I put the rest of my life on hold and barricade myself into my office. It’s about finding the balance, isn’t it?
In my last workshop about blogging at the Fellowship of Australian Writers none of the participants had blogged before. That wasn’t surprising, what struck me though was that no one had ever read a blog before. Subsequently many on the day struggled to grasp the different concepts behind a social media. The shared notion was “blogs, facebook, twitter, tumblr…isn’t that all the same?”
Just writing this last line makes my hair stand on end. It’s kind of saying from a writing aspect a screenplay is the same as a novel and from a social exchange aspect a chat over coffee is the same as a board meeting. Yes, the principles are similar, but obviously none of these things are the same.
Imagine me during the workshop: I had planned to show the group the front and backend of WordPress (since that’s what I’m familiar with) and realised my plan for the session may be way over people’s heads. I took a few steps back and talked about social media in a wider context.
Because the workshop was a terrific experience I’m doing it all again, hurray! If you’re interested in blogging (as I know you are otherwise you wouldn’t read this) and want to learn how it helped me write my first book come along this Sunday 4 November, 1.30pm at FAWWA (it’s only $22).
Christina Neubauer 
I don’t use Facebook a lot, I do check what others are posting but I rarely post anything myself except my blog posts. I set up a travellingbag page and now have 30 followers of that on Facebook so each time I write a blog post I upload it to the Facebook page. The biggest learning experience of blogging? Probably, if you want a lot out of it you have to put a lot into it i.e. reading, connecting and commenting on other blogs and creating that connection. I have found it invaluable though in terms of, there are a lot of people out there like me and If you want to write, you can and you should! Hope that makes sense 🙂
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here – before I started my blog I didn’t have a clue, I actually joined Facebook a whole 2 weeks before I started blogging. In the last 8 months i’ve learnt a lot, but it is sometimes difficult to find that balance 🙂
Wow! How do you find using Facebook? and what do you believe is the biggest learning experience you’ve had so for in terms of blogging?