Blogging, the Craft

This past weekend I attended Camp Blogaway. The camp was the brainchild of Patti Londre of The Londre Group. She blogs at Worth the Whisk about recipes and food. As part of her presentation on

she said something that made me think. In fact, that one statement had me cogitating over it for days.

Patti said she believed blogging was a craft. At first listen I shrank at the thought. A craft? Surely what I’ve been doing for the past few years was more than a craft. Silly me, I was trying to initially equate it with a Martha Stewart do-it-yourself pipe cleaner project. Or crocheting an afghan for a new baby. Or even something like decoupage. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
After spending those few days thinking, pondering, and digesting those words, I finally understood the meaning. Craft by definition is an activity involving skill in making things by hand or a skilled activity or profession. Tom Colicchio’s Restaurant Craft is a great example of using that definition. Skilled activity. Not something to be taken lightly. When you make a reservation to eat at Craft you need to be prepared to drop anywhere from $100 to $200 into Mr. Colicchio’s till. A cook doesn’t command that price, a chef does.

My grandfather was a skilled craftsman. He was a wood pattern maker. He designed and crafted things out of wood that would later be built of steel. His skills had to be perfect, if they weren’t the steel could not be formed. He helped design tanks for the U.S. government. Were it not for his apprenticeship he would never have attained the title of master craftsman. Just like Tom Colicchio, grandpa spent years perfecting his technique and becoming good enough to be “that guy” to get the job done. He also made wood jewelry, bracelets, necklaces and earrings of wood as a pastime. I still have a few he made for my grandmother.

Writing is a craft. The tools are different than Tom’s knives or grandpa’s saws. They’re our words, our emotions, our knowledge. Refined and shaped by our experiences. There were over 75 people at Camp Blogaway. Each of us were there for two and a half day. Each of us sat through the classes and presentations. We heard the same words. However, we filtered them through our experience filter and we’ll write about them in blog posts all over the internet. We’ll tell our story.Our experience there. What changed in us. What light bulb went on over our head and what we wished we’d known a few months or years ago.

That’s what the craft of blogging is all about. It’s telling your story. The root word for blogging is “Web Log” shortened to “blog” over time. It was a way to put our words down to share our experiences with others. To connect to a greater audience. It is not about monetizing, or advertising. It’s about the content of our lives. Is it okay to monetize? Is it okay to advertise? Of course it is. However we all must remember that the reason people come back day after day is the content. We must hone our skill so we say something that is worthy of reading each time we hit that publish button. And if we do, those people will come, the stories will be read. Those stories are in each of us.

What’s yours?