I remember the exact moment I decided between whether I was going to write a book or create a blog. I was crossing the road from Central Station in Newcastle, this road to be exact.
As I recall, it wasn’t this sunny that day. It was a much rainier day, the grey skies and lack of activity had my head elsewhere. Despite being committed to writing in some form, I wasn’t sure which path to take and it was playing on my mind a lot. After a bunch of trips to Waterstones (one of the leading book sellers in the UK) and a bit of online research, I made a decision.
I realised that writing a book without an audience would be like buying a car without wheels. And writing a book with hardly any book-writing experience would be like trying to find that car without wheels whilst blindfolded. All in all I didn’t think it was a wise idea.
The beauty of blogging is that it is much more adaptable. I have changed my site considerably three times since 2014, including the name of it and themes. I like that I can change my style when I feel like it and find out what works and what doesn’t. I will eventually become confident with a final product and until then, I can create content that can be put into a book and increase my writing skills in the process, at the same time build a community that would like to read such a book. It is a perfect route for a potential first-time-author-nobody like me. To think that I even put so much time into simply throwing a book out there is silly looking back. It was the perfect decision and it has been fantastic for so many reasons since I started back in 2014.
Another reason why I had decided to blog is that I can add to it as much as I want, when I want. I am not limited to pages or word count, and my posts don’t really have to follow a theme. One post could be about my recent trip somewhere, the next could be how I am feeling. I don’t have to stick to chapters and I enjoy that writing freedom.
My about me section mentions that I am book writing, and I have roughly 100,000 words stored in chapters waiting to be tidied up and finalised. I have a title but I don’t want to put that out there until it is closer to publishing. I am not going to touch this however until I know that publishing would be at the appropriate time. My blog has evolved since I started to write the book, so I may make big changes to chapters as since then, my opinions and feelings have changed on certain topics. Another pro for writing on WordPress is that I can evolve over time too. If I published in 2014, I might now disagree with some of the things in those chapters. Waiting has been the right choice for me.
Looking back I think I may have started book writing first, getting a few thousand words into a word document. I remember copying and pasting those paragraphs into my earliest blog posts, and I also remember the moment I almost accidentally deleted the whole thing. That was probably another reason why I wanted play it safe with a blog, 100,000 words is rather scary to have in a document unseen. Blogging I can share it bit by bit with my audience and I love that.
What do you think, have you also considered writing a book? Have you one or more published? Let me know in the comments and feel free to share if you have already.
Happy writing!
Featured Photo by Caleb Jones on Unsplash
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Happy blogging,
Sam
One Chance to See the World 