A great exercise (and one I assign to all my consulting clients) is to articulate your overall theme.
If you're a writer, what's the driving reason you write?
Recently in a Twitter conversation, Kathleen Duey, the National Book Award finalist author of Skin Hunger, said about her writing:
"I want to wake kids up to their power."
I thought that was profound, and so well distilled.
So think about it. If your passion is cooking, or comics, or hiking... What's the bottom line of why you're blogging?
If you had to distill it down to one sentence, what would that be?
In my home blog, "I'm Here. I'm Queer. What the Hell do I Read?" my theme is empowering GLBTQ teens and their allies. In this blog, The Zen Of Blogging, my theme is empowering bloggers. And in the books I write, there's the consistent theme of empowering kids and teens to be real and honest about who they are.
Empowerment is the theme that ties all my blogging and writing together. And I aim to express it in a fun, informative and entertaining way.
Now you don't necessarily have to state your theme explicitly in your work or even in your blog posts, but having that through-line with what you do and what you blog will create synergy and help you build a following.
So, I wanna know. What's your theme?
And once you've articulated it, consider how it can be the thread through all your blog posts. And hey, look at what threads can do when woven together:
Namaste, and keep it Zen,
Lee
