Do your blog entries have a second life?
Posted on October 9th, 2007 by Natasha
Since it’s Tuesday morning in London, here is this week’s writing about writing question. If you have a blog about writing, feel free to use this – or any of the past weeks’ questions – to prompt an entry.
Writing about writing, Week #3
Have you ever used entries from your journal/blog in your fiction or other writing projects? If so, how? And did you write the original journal/blog piece with that future purpose in mind?
If you’ve answered this question in your blog, please leave a link to the relevant entry in the comments box below. Alternatively you can write/paste your answer directly in the comments box.
In the past I’ve written a couple of blog entries that garnered enough interest for me to polish into an opinion piece. Those entries weren’t written with an eye toward future publication. It was the readers interest in the topic that made it more than ‘just a blog entry’.
More recently in my Writer’s Round-About blog I write with an eye to marketable pieces. Those entries are polished (usually) with an eye to the fact that they’re very much a professional representation. I’m not aiming to resell them but they are in a place where prospective clients can see them so it’s important to make them presentable and professional.
In my other professional blog, Kids, Pets and Family I write the other way around. Those articles are written for a different market and THEN posted to the blog. Usually the blog version is less polished or longer than the marketable one because of word count restrictions and it’s a lot more web friendly but the two are comparible enough to know that they were originally the same work.
So, I guess there are all sorts of ways to recycle blog entries and more use for them than simply getting ideas down.
Sometimes a blog article is a great way to get thoughts out, and once you do you can see the potential for something greater that wasn’t first apparent.
I am just starting to polish some of my posts up for future publication in one form or another