The Pain in Every Blog Post

I’m going to be honest here. I don’t like blogging. When I first started, I hated it. I’d do anything NOT to blog and I still have that tendency. If I’m in the middle of a good book, I go for that. (Sidebar: I finished Nova Ren Suma’s 17 & Gone over the weekend and it’s so beautifully dark and amazing.) If my husband wants to watch Chuck (renewed TV spy show obsession), we’ll go through two or three episodes before I’ll pick up my laptop. If we don’t have dessert, I’ll make something complicated. JUST DON’T MAKE ME BLOG.

What is it about blogging that I dislike so much? For starters, I don’t write non-fiction. If I’m writing about something I’ve experienced, I fictionalize it. Always. I’m better at fiction than fact, plus it’s weird for me to share (not terribly) personal details with anyone who comes across the blog.

But that’s not the only cause of my blog aversion. Blogging, it turns out, reminds me of all the papers I had to write in college—and I hated writing papers in college. First, those papers were non-fiction. If they were fiction, they were stories, not papers. Most of my college writing was papers. I was in the honors college, so I wrote MANY papers. In our freshman composition course, our professors taught us their preferred paper writing method, the one they wanted us to use ALL THROUGH COLLEGE. They called it the Three Point Five Paragraph Paper. (Maybe those words wouldn’t really be cause for capitals, but our professors made them sound like they started with capital letters.)

A Three Point Five Paragraph Paper means that, no matter what you’re writing about, your paper should finish with five paragraphs:

1st paragraph: introduction in which you say what you’re paper’s proving and what three things you’re going to say to prove it

2nd paragraph: first point to support what your paper’s proving

3rd paragraph: second point to support what your paper’s proving

4th paragraph: third point to support what your paper’s proving

5th paragraph: restate what your paper has proved and the three points you used to prove it

To be fair to my college professors, they wanted us to develop this paper writing style so that, eventually, we weren’t writing just five paragraphs. Still, they wanted the content to serve the original intention. You’ve got a point, so prove your point with at least three sub points. Convince all of us.

Blogging reminds me of these dreaded Three Point Five Paragraph papers because every time I write a blog post, I feel like I’m writing one of those. Check out some of my earlier posts—or even some of the more recent ones. They read just like one of those college papers: I want to talk about this aspect of writing and here are the three ways in which I talk about this aspect of writing and now I’ve talked about this aspect of writing. See it? Maybe not. Maybe you didn’t have to write hundreds of these papers in college. Maybe you didn’t sacrifice your freshman Friday nights so you could turn in one of these papers every freshman Saturday morning.

Right. So. I know what you’re thinking. Believe me, I’ve though it many times. Why, if I don’t like it, do I keep doing it? I often refer to that Writer’s Digest class I took back in August. (Or was it September?) One of the things the literary agents emphasized was that aspiring writers need to get their names out there. Great ways to do this? Social media. Blogging. So now I blog. I trudge through each blog post like it’s one of those college papers I hated writing. Over time, it’s gotten better. It helps when I have something I passionately want to write—like the Baker’s Dozen 2013 contest and sperm whale vomit—and think you’ll like to read—like the Baker’s Dozen 2013 contest…though maybe not the sperm whale vomit. So I’m going to keep blogging, keep getting my name out there, and maybe someday it’ll be worth all these post-college Three Point Five Paragraph posts.