By his good example, Kevin Warmath reminds you to get busy on your BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest entry. We’re about to talk about writing, so let me remind you that I wrote a post on how to write a Black Pearl Diver’s contest entry that advances your interests — and that one post is a virtual how-to on producing profitable real estate weblogging content. If you were to write nothing but mix-and-match variations on that one post format, you could produce a killer blog — interesting to read, very attractive to search engines and a reliable generator of new business.
We have written a lot about writing. The truth is, we have written a lot about everything, but weblogging is a self-referential art form. Blogging about blogging is baked in the cake. The subject comes to my mind now because we were linked last week from the Guardian Unlimited, the web site of the Daily Guardian newspaper in London.
Why them? Why us? They were linking to a preface to a Joseph Conrad novel that I had posted as both a discussion of effective writing and as a thrilling demonstration of Conrad’s premises in action. We Google up first on Conrad’s text, which is how the Guardian found us. And that preface is truly exemplary writing advice, a breathtaking tour de force that is its own best proof of its arguments.
A few days later, I put up my own frail defense of those same arguments:
This is what Conrad was talking about, writing to the senses, writing actions and events that feel to the reader like actual experience.
More:
The point is to think in active, expressive verbs, and particular — granular — nouns and adjectives, using images and metaphors to connect ideas. To write not as discourse but as exposition — the creation of that fascinating dream-like state of hyper-reality in the reader’s mind.
There is a sense in which this is about writing as art, but the other way of looking at things is to see all works of the minds as expressions of the artist within. Sometimes a grocery list is just a grocery list, but there is room for creativity — and for the interest creativity excites in the reader’s mind — in every word we write.
In The silencing of the Lambs, I wrote about a style of prose that is openly hostile to creativity and reader interest, and Jeff Kempe stoutly defended the contrary position in In search of Excellence.
There’s more, and I mean a lot more in our archives, so I’m going to catalog some of those posts. If you’re looking for inspiration in your writing, you’ve come to the right place.
- Writing for money? I’m in real estate. Writing for money is a big part of what I do to earn my living
- The question: How do you write so much? The answer: I don’t
- Weblogging as if it really mattered: How to write with integrity and passion
- Words, words, words: How evocative listing copy helps to sell homes
- Writing better descriptive real estate copy as a path to building character
- Real estate weblogging? Write about blogging
- How to proofread your own writing
- How to write a great blog post
- Dancing on bridges: Apprehending great real estate webloggers
I strongly believe that, if you are interesting enough, you can get away with anything. Brian Brady is more hard-headed than I am, or at least more practical, so he advises you against The Two Sins Writers Commit That Business Bloggers Can’t Afford.
There’s more, and not just from BloodhoundBlog contributors. I’ve enlisted Richard Mitchell’s help on two occasions — so far. He warns us not to slip into the sloppy patterns of thought denoted by sloppy writing, and then he cautions us that the foggy gabble of attorneys and bureaucrats is in fact a language intended to induce fear and surrender.
I love to write, so it is no accident that BloodhoundBlog is so thickly populated with people who also love to write — and who love to write about writing. And, after all, we wrote the book on real estate weblogging.
Even so, there is a lot of writing advice out there, and our way is only one way of going at it. So here is my last word on the subject:
Writers write. You’ll get better by writing, not by doubting yourself. We all miss perfection. It’s the aiming for it that makes us better.
With that: Get writing.
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