Contemplating on how I post.

Patty (the main lady on the Justmommies website and one of their Mommy Blogs contributors) posed a question on the blog asking:

“How do you turn your thoughts into posts you are satisfied with?… do you just blog whatever or do you try to craft your posts? What do you do when you are inspired to blog about something but you can’t get your words out right? Do you scrap it or keep working on it till you are happy with it?”

(read her whole post here: Mommy bloggers, how do you craft your posts?)

I was thinking about how I would reply to her (which I still plan too!) and it got me thinking enough about it to make a blog post here about how it is for me.

Its a convoluted process that I use on blogging.

My first step is, well, live my life. As I go through my day something will usually trigger the impulse to blog. Be it something one of the boys have said or something Belly did. Or it will be what I cooked, or what I did. Sometimes it’ll just be about something I read, saw, or wish I had done differently. About 90% of my post ideas hit me at night while I’m laying in bed going over my day.

Next step, think it to death. Once I have an idea I’ll sit (or lay) and think and think on how I’d go about making my post. What the focus will be, the tone I’ll use, the syntax. Do I want to post it in my own “voice,” or do I want to take the time to make it easy to understand and be read without readers having to be fluent in Trishology? Do I want to include pictures? Do I even have any pictures I could use? Will it be humorous or silly or angry?

Step three, get to typing. When I get the chance I sit down, pull up Live Writer, and prepare to be confused, angry, thoughtful, frustrated, and drained. I’m not one who can go through type a rough draft of a post and then go through and fill it in with the meaty details. I type out a sentence and think about it in relationship to the sentence before it. Do they flow well? Am I keeping my tenses correct? Is this really how I want to put my thought down? Did I throw in any cuss words without noticing? (Yeah… I swear a lot in my thoughts and type my thoughts as I think them so very often they get included on accident.) Are there any red squiggly lines reminding me that I have no knack for spelling at all? I’ll finish a paragraph then go through and re-read the whole thing. Do I still like it? Do the sentences combine together to form a coherent thought? Is it choppy and stilted? I go through this as I type the post re-reading constantly to see how it all flows and meshes, and I just keep at it until I’m happy with it.

The final step, do I like it? Once I finish typing the whole thing and feel I have no thoughts at all left to add to my post I do a final read through. I try to catch any mistakes that seem glaring to my eye, or that Live Writer has so thoughtfully underlined as if to say “Yo! This ain’t right!” Then I sit and I ponder. Did I get the point across that I was trying to make? Does it at least attempt to make sense? And most importantly, do I like what I wrote? Since I try not to second guess myself, I, at this point, pat myself on my back and think “Way to go Trish, you did it and didn’t punch the computer as an outlet of your frustrations,” then click the publish button. Yeah I may, a week or two later, think, “What the hell was I thinking when I typed that?!” But I never second guess myself enough to remove it. I figure if I liked it enough to get through the whole thinking and typing process then it was really what I was thinking and feeling at the time and it deserves a place with the rest of my thoughts.

So, that’s how I blog. Like I said it’s not the easiest or shortest process, but at least you readers can comfort yourself in the fact that I think really long and hard about something before posting it to my blog in an explosion of word vomit.