Nov 28 2008
Characteristic Voices and Plot Lines in Blog Posts
I get a lot of my ideas from the various writing groups I belong to and ran across one this evening that made me think. It has to do with creating plot lines in your writing. In essence, it said that bloggers didn’t need to worry about creating plot lines and characters, but I don’t think this to be the case.
No matter what a person writes about, they create a plot line in their post. For instance, the plot within this post is about, well, plots. Someone who writes about making money online, creates a specific plot in their posts, as does someone who runs a cooking blog. Though they may not realize it, they have created a plot line for their piece.
The same is true for characters. Each post carries a particular voice, which is the blog’s character. When you write a post about what you had for dinner, you take on the character of cook, or just as diner. However, when you blog about the intricacies of monetizing your site, you take on the character of teacher or expert. Though these two different types of posts can be found on the same blog, they have distinctly different characteristics.
When you read a particular blog on a regular basis, you might find that you’ve created an image of the blogger in your mind. Just like reading about a certain character in a book, your image is probably totally different than someone else who reads the same pages. Ironically, if you were to meet that blogger walking down the street, you would probably find that they didn’t fit your perception at all.
Whether you write fictional stories, or non-fictional blog posts, pay attention to the plot behind your words, and the character’s voice in which you write. You might even realize that as you write your posts, the characteristic voices in your mind sound different per each post. And that, my friends, is the basics to true creative writing.
Wow… so very true. There are blogs that I have read for months and during that time I develop a visual image of what I perceive they look like. What usually happens is one day they happen to post a picture on their blog and they look nothing like I visioned. This also happens to me when I read books and then later that book gets made into a movie.
LOL, exactly. Ironically, Stephan King almost didn’t let his book The Stand become a movie because of that very thing. He knew that his readers would have a mental picture of all the characters, and a movie would ruin that mystery.
However, he did have the movie made, and being one of those people who actually read the book first, I was highly disappointed as it’s wasn’t anything like I imagined. The book was way better.