Freshly Pressed/Stale and Wrinkled/None of the above

I keep coming across blog posts giving the how-to’s for getting a post be “Freshly Pressed.”  It’s great, really.  These writers who are talented, creative, and witty enough to be awarded a Freshly Pressed entry sharing their ones and twos on how they got to where they are.  But I see it as less a calculated formula to blog success and more just good-fortune and luck.

Write about something interesting.  Of course, that would be helpful to have a successful blog.  However, the things that interest me probably don’t interest even a fraction of other bloggers on this site.  So are you then supposed to write about something that the masses find interesting, rather that something you find interesting?  Well, that just wouldn’t work either.  I don’t care how good of a writer a person is, if they are writing about something they aren’t interested in or don’t care for, that comes across in their writing no matter how hard they try to camouflage it.  I imagine that a dull, drab, borderline anti-“whatever the subject matter is” blog post will be even further from being Freshly Pressed than an intriguing, excitable post about a topic with a smaller fan base.

Make sure you make clear and concise statements, using good grammar, yada yada yada.  Is this supposed to be a surprise?  A writer should, at all times, ensure that their writings are full of real sentences with proper grammar unless is serves the writing to be done otherwise.  For example: I am well aware that “yada yada yada” is gibberish.  However, it was useful to the point I was attempting to make in that sentence, which was that I felt that finishing that sentence was pointless because the information it would have provided should be common sense for any writer.

Tips like those could be given to any writer at any point.  In my opinion, they do not really give advice to those seeking to be Freshly Pressed.  Following these tis and tricks will probably help your writing abilities improve, which could possibly increase the popularity of your blog over time, but doing these things will not suddenly result in having this glorious WordPress title bestowed upon you.  This is because this title comes by luck.  People’s interests change daily and there is such a magnitude of bloggers from all over the world on just this one site that most of us go unheard for most of the time.  I really feel that a person getting freshly pressed is sheer luck that their blog post somehow rose above the sea of all other blog posts on that particular day.

I have no idea what the true process of being chosen for Freshly Pressed is, I just based this on the posts I’ve read from bloggers that have been Freshly Pressed and are sharing their road to good fortune with the rest of us.  I have not been Freshly Pressed myself, and expect that I never will be because, while I feel I am a decent writer, I know there are much better ones out there with more interesting subject matter and more profound statements.  I’m okay with that, because I did not start this blog to get notoriety from it.  (I’m not saying that wouldn’t be nice, I’m just saying it wasn’t my original intent)

Please understand that if you are one of those bloggers seeking to be Freshly Pressed, I am not trying to be Debbie Downer.  I’m not trying to be cynical about this idea.  I am just being real.  I have found in my lifetime that being real and expecting less breeds more chances for you to be surprised by good fortune and appreciative when things happen while avoiding the anger and self-pity of expecting things to happen that never do.  I am also not attempting to demean those posts that have been Freshly Pressed.  I do read them and they are of impeccable quality and interesting.  I’m just pointing out that I have read many a blog post that is of impeccable quality and overly interesting that is not Freshly Pressed.  Basically, I think it’s okay not to be Freshly Pressed and that it doesn’t mean that you are Stale and Wrinkled.  I intend to continue focusing on myself, my ability, and what I can create with it with the intension of just having readers in general that like the way I write.  And, hey – if i get Freshly Pressed along the way, I’ll be happy for myself.  If not, I’ll still be successful for just putting my stuff out there.