Rebranding, reinvention, & ten years of blogging. With some initial words about Benedict XVI.

hen I began this blog on Jan­u­ary 1, 2013, Bene­dict XVI was pope. He resigned short­ly there­after. Now, on the eve of my eleventh year, he has died. That’s a coin­ci­dence, but my first ten years now feel book­end­ed by Bene­dict. The Pope Fran­cis Derange­ment Syn­drome that fol­lowed his res­ig­na­tion has com­mand­ed a lot of my atten­tion over ten years and changed the path this blog might oth­er­wise have gone. That’s not bad. It also exposed a great deal of shal­low pan­ic in Catholics who vocal­ly con­sid­er them­selves faith­ful among the faith­ful and learned among the learned.

There will be much writ­ten in the days to come about the lega­cy, par­tic­u­lar­ly intel­lec­tu­al and the­o­log­i­cal, of Bene­dict XVI. For me, his great­est act was his res­ig­na­tion; and that has noth­ing to do with who came next. It was his great­est act because it was a demon­stra­tion of com­plete trust. He trust­ed, utter­ly, that the Church is in the hands of the Holy Spir­it. He trust­ed that Christ would not aban­don his Bride. He trust­ed that he could leave and serve the Church in prayer and all would be well and all man­ner of thing would be well.

God did not give his ser­vant Bene­dict XVI a spir­it of fear, and that is in strik­ing con­trast to the fret­ful­ness of Catholics who sud­den­ly act­ed as though the Church’s sur­vival depend­ed upon Bene­dict rather than upon Christ and wan­dered around in a state of pan­ic, imag­in­ing dev­as­ta­tion every­where and exclaim­ing, “Dear saints, help us!” Not Bene­dict. Bene­dict trust­ed Christ with the Church. That is the great­est thing he did.

—

So it has been ten years since I pub­lished my first blog arti­cle, and it is no longer the same blog, I am no longer the same blog­ger, nor the same per­son, I was ten years ago. As though I could have been.

There exist a glut of “ten things I learned in ten years of blog­ging” posts, and I’m skep­ti­cal of such things, but what the hell, I’m going to write one too—because I can.

• Ignore the crit­ics. Crit­ics don’t mat­ter.

Someone—Rebecca Brat­ten Weiss, I think—has a rule of thumb nev­er to reply to any­one who has few­er fol­low­ers. It’s a good rule. But oth­ers are more strin­gent and don’t reply to any­one. Ear­ly in his career, the nov­el­ist John Irv­ing got so flum­moxed and dis­tract­ed by neg­a­tive reviews that he instruct­ed his pub­lish­er to only send him reviews that were pos­i­tive.

You could say Irv­ing is suc­cess­ful enough to have that lux­u­ry. Or you could say that ignor­ing crit­ics helped him to become suc­cess­ful; he did­n’t get side­lined address­ing and fret­ting over crit­ics and just focused on the next book.

Ignore them. Noth­ing you do will sat­is­fy the chron­i­cal­ly dis­pleased. Just write.

• Write like you.

Obvi­ous­ly you can’t ever expel from your style the writ­ers you’ve read and love. I know I have turns of phrase that reveal I’ve read a lot of Dick­ens. (And inci­den­tal­ly, dear read­er, when I write “wery,” that’s what I’m doing. It’s not a typo; don’t e‑mail me. I’m steal­ing from Dick­ens when he writes Cock­ney dia­logue.)

The writ­ers you read and love are you. You are, in part, the books you’ve read. You are the peo­ple you’ve met, the expe­ri­ences you’ve had. Use them all with­out being ashamed of it. They are all a part of your own gen­uine voice; no one lives in a cell apart from influ­ences. Just don’t lis­ten to any­one try to tell you what you should write, or what kind of blog you should write—or poem, or book, or any­thing else.

“But Alt! What you should real­ly write is an arti­cle about why Chris­tians are now per­mit­ted to mar the cor­ners of their beard!”

Shut up.

• There are no rules.

There are entire blog arti­cles, and ye shall find them if ye seek, about how all the rules are wrong.

Once upon a time, I was told that I should lim­it myself to 500 words, because no one reads any­thing longer. After 500 words, their eyes fall out, or they remem­ber it’s their wife’s birth­day, or their bat­tery dies, or they’re rap­tured up, or some­thing.

But no. True it is my most-read blog arti­cle was 418 words. But my first arti­cle to reach 10,000 page views was 4600.

What works works.

That does­n’t mean wordi­ness is okay. “Pro­lix­i­ty be now my good,” at least one blog­ger I know seems to think. But it does mean that arti­fi­cial rules are more super­sti­tion than any­thing else.

• There is no for­mu­la for a viral post.

I’ve writ­ten posts I meant to go viral, and oth­ers I thought sure would go viral, and maybe ten peo­ple read them.

But the two that sur­passed 35,000 page views? I did­n’t think any­one would notice or care. Until The Wash­ing­ton Post picked up on one and seem­ing­ly all of Catholic Face­book on the oth­er.

It harms the writ­ing to think too much—even to think at all—about how many peo­ple are going to end up read­ing it. Just write as well as you can. That’s all you can con­trol.

• Hav­ing con­trol mat­ters.

At least to me it mat­ters; I can’t speak for you. But I like hav­ing con­trol over my design and my fonts. And I’m attached to the drop cap and jus­ti­fied para­graphs. I also like being able to freely edit (or even delete) my own posts lat­er. The blog is mine; I like hav­ing full con­trol and own­er­ship over it.

• Read oth­er blogs, espe­cial­ly out­side your niche.

Do it for the same rea­son all writ­ers read inces­sant­ly: It feeds the well of inspi­ra­tion. Sgt. Pep­per would­n’t have been Sgt. Pep­per if the Bea­t­les had­n’t lis­tened to oth­er musicians—especially the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds.” It’s obvi­ous that John Irv­ing picked up some ideas from Gunter Grass when he wrote A Prayer for Owen Meany. It should be no dif­fer­ent with blog­gers.

Two of my favorite blogs aren’t even Catholic blogs: I Love Typog­ra­phy and The Mar­gin­a­lian (for­mer­ly Brain Pick­ings, if you weren’t aware of the change).

• Con­nect on social media with oth­er blog­gers.

All writ­ers have writer friends. Blog­gers should have blog­ger friends. This strikes me as com­mon sense. It’s nec­es­sary for the same rea­son read­ing oth­er blogs is nec­es­sary.

• Writ­ing a blog post takes a LOT of work.

If you’re going to do it the right way, any­way. Some peo­ple have a fond idea that blog­ging is some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing sim­pler, more pedes­tri­an, than actu­al writ­ing.

But no.

Hav­ing a suc­cess­ful blog takes more. I can’t say how suc­cess­ful my blog has been com­pared to oth­ers’; I do know it has been far more suc­cess­ful than I thought it might be when I began ten years ago.

• You have a respon­si­bil­i­ty to fact-check your­self.

I know, I know; a lot of blog­gers skip this step. (I pause to remind myself I am against the death penal­ty.)

Here’s a sug­ges­tion: Find a pri­ma­ry, reli­able source for every thing you present as fact, and link to it. (Or cite it, if it’s not online.) If you don’t know what a pri­ma­ry source is, or how to judge the reli­a­bil­i­ty of a source, or what the dif­fer­ence is between a fact and an opin­ion, stop now and don’t blog again until you’ve found out.

When you put your name to your post, you are moral­ly respon­si­ble for the truth of what’s in it.

• The act of writ­ing is itself rein­ven­tion.

“I write,” Flan­nery O’Con­nor said, “because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

My ten years of blog­ging has been a con­tin­u­al act of rein­ven­tion, and that rein­ven­tion occurred in the act of writ­ing itself.

You don’t set out to do it. You do it because you’re alive. And I do it because I con­tin­ue to think, and I think through my writ­ing. Writ­ing is itself a think­ing act.

Some­times I think: “I was wrong before.” Or: “I was right before but I could have said that dif­fer­ent­ly.”

Don’t start a blog if you aren’t pre­pared to read through it after ten years and find a doc­u­men­ta­tion of all the ways you’ve changed in that time.

•••

Rein­ven­tion is nec­es­sary and good. Any­thing you do in life is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to rein­vent your­self. You rein­vent your­self in mar­riage. You rein­vent your­self in adult­hood, in choos­ing a career, or chang­ing a career, in decid­ing to divorce, in con­vert­ing to a new church, in mov­ing to a new place, in get­ting up anoth­er morn­ing, in any­thing you do.

As for the changes on this blog, or in my writ­ing, over the next ten years, I make no pre­dic­tions, and I cer­tain­ly make no res­o­lu­tions. I just keep going, and you’re invit­ed to come along, dear read­er.