Thursday, May 6, 2010

The Same Ol' Stuff

I saw a Facebook post the other day that struck me funny and I don’t mean laugh out loud funny (though most people who claim to laugh out loud really don’t) but funny in an odd sort of way. It wasn’t particularly interesting, but an author mentioned something she was doing to prepare for a class she was teaching on blogging. The thing that struck me funny was that here we are and pretty much all of us are blogging. If we aren’t it is because we don’t want to. There have been many people who have taught classes on blogging and there is a ton of information on the Internet about blogging. Do we really need another class on blogging?



As I thought about it, I thought about all of the stuff that is out there, not just classes about blogging. Look at the classes they teach at writer’s conferences and I get the same feeling that I’ve seen this all before. Visit agents’ blogs and so much of what they say is the same stuff over and over. One agent may say it slightly different than another, but it’s the same stuff. And I’ve looked at the stuff people are saying about developing websites and website design and it is pretty much all the same stuff.



I’m beginning to realize that the reason so many communicators are forgettable is because they say nothing worth remembering. If you go to a conference and hear someone talk about blogging and I go to another conference to hear someone talk about blogging, it isn’t likely that we will remember what each other said about our particular experience. If we do remember, we aren’t likely to seek out that speaker because we already know what was said.



So much emphasis is put on the skill of the writer. That is important, but skill is of little help if the writer has nothing to say. So many people are just rehashing the same old stuff. There may be thousands of unpublished authors out there, but I believe there is room for those authors who can tell us something that other people aren’t. So tell me something I haven’t heard.