Edited on May 13, 2020 to include two responses to this post: On Blogging and Requiem on Blogging.
I’ve been blogging on various sites more or less continuously since I was in college.
It started after I read a friend’s blog and realized I could do that, too.
Several of the blogs I worked on solo or as part of a group of bloggers no longer exist, but PK Stories is an exception to that.
I was a preacher’s kid growing up and spent a few years sharing amusing stories from that part of my childhood. (Please note that I’ve learned a lot about writing, blogging, and storytelling since that site was last active. It’s pretty old).
Blogging has changed quite a bit over the years. The best practices for it these days are generally thought to include picking one topic and only writing about that.
So why don’t I follow that rule? Well, there are a few reasons for that.
Content Fatigue
Actual footage of my thought processes after a couple of years of writing about the same topic every week.
I’ve learned through trial and error that I experience content fatigue on single-topic blogs after about two or three years.
It’s tricky for me to know where to go next after I’ve covered everything I want to say, especially since I dislike recycling posts or repeating myself.
Rather than building a new site from scratch every other year, I now prefer to stick to the same site and bounce around among a few different topics instead.
Kudos to those of you who can blog about the same thing for years or decades.
I admire your constancy, but my creativity eventually struggles under those circumstances.
Overlapping Interests
There may be some people on this planet whose interests all exist in well-defined bubbles that never intersect with each other, but I’m not one of them.
My fitness posts often reference science fiction or fantasy because I think about topics like Frodo’s long walk to Mordor or what it would really be like to use a Holodeck for my workouts. (Yes, I will actually write that post one of these days).
Sometimes I need to share childhood stories when I talk about the magic of Halloween so my readers will understand why it’s so important to me.
Yoga is both a workout and an exercise in mindfulness. That still blows my mind and may require a few more posts to fully explore.
So why not talk about all of the fascinating things that move between and connect these seemingly-unrelated topics?
Simple Human Curiosity
Look, would I ever tell someone else what to write about on their site? Absolutely not!
But I do quietly love it when bloggers reveal new pieces of their personal lives and interests that may or may not be related to the main topic(s) of their sites.
There’s something delightful and surprising about everyone once you get to know them well enough.
It’s amazing to learn that someone you’ve followed and interacted with for years has this whole other side to them that you’d never would have predicted whether that’s a hobby, interest, or something else entirely.
So one of the other big reasons why I jump between topics is to give my readers a better understanding of who I am as a person. Yes, half or more of my posts are about the science fiction and fantasy genres in any given month because of how passionate I am about them, but those aren’t my only interests by any means.
My hope is that by sharing these parts of myself other bloggers might be encouraged to do the same thing.
How did you all pick the topic(s) for your sites? What made you stick to one topic on your site or include multiple ones on it?
I started blogging back in the early 2000s when most of the bloggers I knew used Blogspot. One of the things I miss the most from that era are response posts.
There are many things I appreciate about social media, but it’s hard to fit complex ideas or discussions into a few 280-character tweets. The beautiful thing about the blogosphere is how much more room there is in a blog post to add subtley to your point of view.