You Should Blog

So that no thought of mine, no matter how stupid, will ever go unpublished again!

I ran across the phenomenon known as “blogging” in 2002, thanks to the labors of the magnificent Amy Welborn. She had been blogging about life from a lay-Catholic perspective for some while, and I had been as typically slow to notice this blogging technology as I am to catch up with others. (Just to give you some perspective, I only acquired a cell phone somewhere around 2006 and still don’t know how to use 99 percent of the features.)

The Attractions of Blogging

What caught my attention was not just the quality of Amy’s work but that the technology she was using to publish it was interactive with readers and that it was not subject to any editorial oversight but Amy’s. This meant that Amy could speak as she pleased with no editors to edit, no headline writers to change “Exploring the Mysteries of the Rosary” to “My Friend the Rosary”—and she could do so with a sort of familiar casual conversationalism that is impossible to achieve in the pages of a magazine, book, or newspaper for the simple reason that the reader can only respond via a letter to the editor a week or a month later.

That was greatly attractive for a number of reasons. First, it being the spring of 2002, the American Catholic Church was just entering into the Long Lent of the priest abuse scandals that still cast a long shadow over the Church around the world. Lots of dumb things were being said in the media (“This horrible crime is caused by celibacy and an all-male priesthood!”), and it seemed to me that laypeople with a reasonable working knowledge of the Faith could speak to an American culture about the Faith better than a priest could (since anybody in a collar was, at that time, being unfairly treated as an accessory to the crime). It also seemed to me that, with events unfolding so rapidly, it was important to be able to respond in as close to real time as possible. Blogging made that possible.

But that wasn’t all that attracted and held me to blogging: I am an extrovert trapped in an introvert’s job. I write for a living when what I would much rather be doing is gabbing with people.

So it wasn’t so much to write as to teach that I became a writer: to gab with anybody who would listen to what the Faith taught, because what the Faith teaches is beautiful, good, and liberating. I had turned to writing for the Catholic press because it offered the best forum for me to do that. Now, with the advent of the blogosphere, I had an even broader forum—one that could reach anybody in the world with access to the Internet. And best of all, it was a forum where I could interact with my readers, getting feedback, argument, agreement, correction, new information, and new ideas for articles in real time. So I signed up with Blogger.com and launched Catholic and Enjoying It! in April 2002.

What to Blog About?

The motto of my blog more or less sums up what I’m about:

So that no thought of mine, no matter how stupid, will ever go unpublished again!

For those interested in starting their own blog, this is a first clue about the differences in culture between the blogosphere and the traditional press. Newspapers, radio, and TV need to sell beer and shampoo, be accountable to stockholders, not tick off the viewers too much, and generally be beholden to certain rules of the market. But a blog, not so much. A blogger can pretty much blog about anything he or she pleases. If you care about politics, then you can vote to blog about that. If you love music, then tune your blog that way. If your interest lies in boxing, knock yourself out. If it’s food, belly up to the keyboard and write about it! And if, like me, you are fascinated with how the Catholic faith illuminates everything from soup to nuts, then step out in faith and talk about it. It’s your blog, and you can say whatever you want to.

My suggestion: start with whatever you’d say to a good friend about the stuff that interests you. In my case, I just jumped into the ordinary ebb and flow of stuff that was in the news, as well as my own burbling about whatever I was interested in or found funny. So what if you aren’t an expert? I’m certainly not. But you know something about something. I happened to know a fair amount about things like Catholic theology and the experiences of a convert. So I spoke from there.

It’s also important to focus on making your blog about ideas, not persons. The world has enough personal grudge matches. Don’t add yours. Argue, by all means, but try to avoid quarrels (and extricate yourself and apologize when you get sucked into them. I’ve had to do that a number of times).

It Takes a Village to Raise a Blog

The very nature of the Internet is interactivity. When planting my blog, I decided from the get-go to both exploit the connections I had and to make new ones with brashness. So I e-mailed writers and bloggers I either knew or whose work I liked and said, “Hey! I’ve started a blog! Could you tell your readers?” There’s no need to be shy about that. The worst that can happen is that the blogger or writer will ignore you. The best (and much more common thing) that can happen is that the blogger you contact will stick a link up announcing “New blog!”—thereby funneling his or her readership to you and providing you with your first readers. I have a number of readers who send me links to stuff they’ve written and who link stuff I write. Additionally, of course, you can use other social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) to refer readers in those circles to your blog.

As you continue to blog, keep a little list in the back of your mind of other bloggers who might be interested in a given piece you’ve written and send them a link suggesting they might like it. The more your blog is present to the public consciousness, the more chances readers have to say, “It’s that guy again. I liked his piece on ‘Prayer and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,’ so I think I’ll check out his new piece on ‘Underwater Basket Weaving and the Second Coming.’” The trick is to realize that readers develop loyalty to writers, not topics. If they come to like you, they’ll read whatever you choose to write about, because they like you.

Care and Feeding of the Combox Denizen

A vital part of my blog is the combox (short for “comment box”). Different blogging platforms have different software available for these and you can season your choice to taste, including having no combox at all if you like.

I installed a combox on my blog early in the game because a) it became clear that I would be overwhelmed with mail if I didn’t, and b) a huge part of the attraction of blogging was the interaction with readers. The basic rule of thumb I maintain in my comboxes is “Treat me and others as you would if you were a guest in my living room.” This makes for lots of conversation and argument, but also gives me leeway to boot out abusers, trolls, human toothaches, and sundry advocates of evil, terminal dumbness or rudeness.

The basic procedure is common sense: the large majority of your readers are Normal People, so my own suggestion is to take a pretty laissez faire approach to the conversations that start up in comboxes. People can take care of themselves and generally know how to advance their own views and defend themselves in conversation with critics. Don’t nanny the conversations too much or people will give up trying to talk if you jump on them all the time. On the other hand, do keep your finger (lightly) on the pulse so that conversations don’t spin out of control and trolls don’t suck all the oxygen out of the room with their domineering personalities that force quieter (and more profound and interesting) souls back into the shadows. That’s more or less a skill learned by practice.

As to the fringe folk, warn troublemakers a couple times, and if they don’t shape up, give them the boot. And don’t be intimidated when they write you in high dudgeon to accuse you of censorship because you aren’t interested in their torrent of profanity, their theories about how wonderful and misunderstood Hitler’s SS was, or their obsessive need to talk about their hobby horse and drag all conversations back to it. It’s your blog. You don’t owe them (or anybody else) a public forum. Your comboxes are a courtesy to readers, not a sacred right for which our ancestors bled and died.

Your Blog: Home Base and City on a Hill

One great thing about a blog is that you can test-drive ideas that you can expand in other places. It’s a safe place among friends (by and large) who enjoy what you say and the way you say it. A goodly percentage of the articles I have written for other media have begun as conversations on my blog or as goofy conceits I have first drafted on a lark there. If I find myself giggling or thinking “I never thought of that before! Cool!” that’s a good clue that I should follow it up with some sort of polished version of the idea. Sometimes I will quote a remark by a reader and then comment on it or spool the idea out a bit further in order to examine the implications. (I mention on my blog that I observe the Welborn Protocol, which states that all correspondence is quotable unless the reader specifically forbids it.) So if you are interested in writing beyond the blogosphere, you can treat the blog as a sort of home base from which to launch out on further adventures in book or magazine publishing.

The bad news is: You will screw up (as I do) while blogging. You will say something unjust. You will write in anger. You will fail to check a source adequately and state something bunk as fact. You will let your prejudices color your judgment. It’s bound to happen. Welcome to the human race. But the happy news is that when you do, you have the power to say, “Mea culpa”—and then try to make amends by doing better next time. So don’t let that stop you.

You will still, of course, make enemies. But you will also find friendship, love, goodness, and fascinating new ideas.

Mark Shea is a popular blogger at the Patheos Catholic Channel and the author of several books, including By What Authority? and Salt and Light: The Commandments, the Beatitudes, and a Joyful Life. This essay has been adapted from a chapter in New Media: Blogging Converts, Online Activists, and Bishops Who Tweet (Our Sunday Visitor, 2011).