You Can Write About Anything

I was thinking about how recently (other than the weeknotes), my blog posts have been mostly reviews of stuff I've been watching/playing/reading/etc and I haven't made any posts about blogging or tech stuff or that sort of thing that I used to write about a decent amount. I was wondering if this was a problem, but then realized this was silly. It's my site and my blog and I can publish any kind of content that I want!

A common question when you suggest someone start blogging is "What would I even write about?" and the answer is simply "You can write anything you want!"

Some people starting out blogging may read some advice about writing about a specific topic or niche and focusing on that. I guess that is fine advice if your main focus is something silly like making money from blogging or "content marketing" or "building a personal brand" or somesuch. But you should always consider writing as a form of personal expression, and as a form of personal expression, it doesn't make sense to limit yourself or to hold back any of your interests.

I have tried limiting my writing to specific topics before. Early in my blogging years, I wrote a list of dev stuff I thought I could post about, with the goal of being a "tech blogger". Later I also tried writing blogs dedicated to Magic the Gathering or comic books. In all of these cases, I found it difficult to keep up writing about the same topic day in and day out. This is probably partly because I am easily distracted, but I also really think life is more interesting when we aren't focused on the same thing all the time.

I follow some economists on social media; I find their posts about economics, academic studies, trends in geopolitics, etc interesting enough, but the ones that I consider more interesting follows are those that also post about other, more personal interests like their pet rabbits or movies or anime or other things like that.

Recently a friend who is a very serious figure in certain business circles started tweeting about one of her fandom "ships". Later on she mentioned that some people had suggested she set up an "alt" account for her fandom stuff because it "detracts from her image". Her response: "Thanks but I don't think any of my fandoms detract anything from my accomplishments. Normalize being true to your geeky fanfic reading die hard shipper self AND kicking ass."

I find that my preference for variety extends to the people I read and feeds I follow. Most of the my regular follows on social media or blogs on my blogroll are generally people who post about a variety of topics and interests. I do sometimes visit sites that are very narrow, like say Python/JavaScript/CSS focused sites or Magic the Gathering sites, but usually only when I am in certain moods or mindsets or I am seeking out specific information.

There is of course the concern of signal to noise ratio. If you write about a wide band of stuff, you risk putting off people who are only interested in a small subset of your content. And I think that's fine actually? People should be free to choose the mix of content they want to follow. Alternatively, people could provide feeds that filter to specific topics for people to follow. On this blog, tags like software-development or tech-life or blogging serve that purpose.

You are (I hope) a person, not a company or a "brand". People are a varied lot and each individual has their own peculiar set of interests. What you write about and who you read on the internet should reflect that. I think that the world and the internet are big enough that there will be people who will be interested in your writing anyway. And I believe the internet will be all the richer for it.

(I originally wanted to title this post "What should you write about?" but then I realized I'm not a clickbait-y ad-hungry website, I can just put the answer in the title)