Blogging Your Naked Passion - Are You Brave Enough by Jenny Hansen

The day has arrived!  It's Life List Club Friday and the witty, thoughtful Jenny Hansen is here to guest post!  Please give Jenny a warm welcome and enjoy her wonderful post about blogging bravery.   If you're wondering where I am, you can find me over at Sonia G. Medeiros's discussing Extreme Perseverance.  Welcome, Jenny!

Blogging Your Naked Passion – Are You Brave Enough? By Jenny Hansen

Courtesy of janellesalah.com

There is a magnet on my refrigerator with a phrase by Zora Neale Hurston that says, “There are years that ask the questions and years that answer.”

Sometimes, if we’re very lucky, a year does both.

Some of the questions the last few years have asked me are:

• How to be a mom?
• How to blog?
• How to own a home?
• How to balance work, writing and family?
• How to plant a garden and keep up a yard?

All of these questions share one common thread: the answers can’t be easily explained.

You just have to forge ahead and try things out to see what works and what doesn’t. Sure there’s manuals, but it’s usually quicker to forge ahead and just try rather than reading 20 books first, especially with parenting.

I’d say the only question above where this “give it your best try” approach DOESN’T apply is blogging. There are a number of wonderful resources available for bloggers. However, I recommend a shortcut: social media genius, Kristen Lamb.

Kristen’s books We Are Not Alone–The Writer’s Guide to Social Media and Are You There, Blog? It’s Me, Writer  should be required for ANYONE who wants to blog, but most especially for writers.

If you have a blog, want a blog or just have the idea of one tickling the edge of your mind, I’d make fast tracks for Kristen. She says that your blog should…

OMG, wait for it…
…MATCH YOU.

That’s it. No big hidden secrets of blog success (besides getting yourself on social media so people can find you and your genius). Your blog should be about the things you love and the things that interest YOU. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t interact with your followers, just that every blog starts with you.

Courtesy of Google Images

I sum it up as: you need to be authentic.

The same way a writer’s fiction shouts, “This is who I am,” your blog will too. I’m pretty sure that’s why so many bloggers ran screaming for their pillows when Kristen posted this on what writers should blog about (hint: not just writing).

I’m sure many of them were thinking:
You want me to be personal? To hang my passion out naked for the world? Are you kidding me?  This is NOT Weiner-gate, Kristen! This is MY BLOG.

Authentic is scary. It’s exposing and humbling and real. If you’ve read Margery Williams’ book, The Velveteen Rabbit, she describes this perfectly:

“What is REAL?" asked the Velveteen Rabbit one day... "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When [someone] loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept.

"Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand... once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real

In today’s world, where “reality TV” is staged and we watch our public figures lie without qualm, our blogging pals give us an important slice of real.

Are you letting your naked passion hang out for the world to see? What do you like about blogs? What makes you bookmark or subscribe to a blog?

About Jenny Hansen

Jenny fills her nights with humor: writing memoir, women’s fiction, chick lit, short stories (and chasing after the newly walking Baby Girl). By day, she provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. After 15 years as a corporate software trainer, she’s digging this sit down and write thing.

When she’s not at her blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at jhansenwrites and at her group blog, Writers In The Storm. Every Saturday, she writes the Risky Baby Business posts at More Cowbell, a series that focuses on babies, new parents and high-risk pregnancy.