Come here a minute; I have something personal to ask you.
How many friends do you have?
Oxford anthropologist Robin Dunbar says most of us have 150 friends, give or take. Those 150 people include your family, your close friends, and some of your friends’ friends.
Why 150? Dunbar found that in county after county, that’s how many people were listed in medieval England’s Domesday book . It’s also about how many people live in a typical Amish community today.
Science writer David Bradley , who says our personal networks are “all about separation, connection, gossip and grooming,” thinks we can use social media apps like Facebook to form “specific cliques” of 150 to 200 people and expand our friendships that way.
(No, I have no idea what he meant by grooming either.)
But what does the Dunbar Number have to do with blogging?
When you blog, you have the potential to reach not 150 people, but thousands.
The temptation when you try to reach people is to try to make them friends by not offending them. After all, aren’t we all trained from childhood to be nice so people like us and want to be our friends?
The trouble is, if you’re trying to build a blog readership by being your readers’ friend, you’re doomed to failure.
Because as much as readers want solid content delivered in a friendly tone, they want even more to be entertained and challenged. They want you to take a stand and defend it to the death, and tell them to do the same.
They want you to stomp on the bull shitters and hypocrites (provided, of course, that they agree with you on who the bull shitters and hypocrites are).
A few days ago, columnist Andy Borowitz , commenting on the Iowa Caucus, included this sentence:
“Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed speculation about whether he would leave the race: ‘Not unless it gets cancer.’ ”
Now either you think that’s brilliantly funny or you’re offended beyond belief.
Borowitz is a Democrat and proud of it. Conservatives don’t read him; liberals like me forward his blog to their friends.
In the blogosphere, we have people like Johnny B. Truant , who has a loyal following because he’s smart, prolific, and offers mega value.
On the other hand, if phrases like his “magic fucking pixies” offend you, Sonia Simone may be more your style. Sonia also offers great style and content but seldom talks about fucking pixies. (Probably never, I haven’t done a search on all her posts.)
My guess is that both Johnny and Simone are not interested in building a big following for its own sake, but to build a following of their kind of people.
Johnny calls them “raving fans”; Seth Godin calls them “tribes.”
If you like blogs about writing (which I assume you do, since you’re reading this one), you may dig James Chartrand of Men with Pens .
Chartrand is a fine writer and coach, provided you can get past her constant shilling for her “Damn Fine Words” writing course. Frankly, it bugs the hell out of me.
I also like Jeff Goins who recently described a typo on a menu as “like a squirt of lemon juice to the eye.” Beautiful.
Jon Morrow is in a class by himself, which I say with the disclaimer that I’m in his GuestPosting class.
You are never in doubt where Jon stands. Yet he manages to be both kind to others and wide open about himself.
So. Whatever you write, don’t try to make friends. Kick enough ass to make a few enemies too.
Ha! Saw this come in on the links and smiled. Thanks, Jean.
And no, I don’t think you’ve missed any references to copulating magical creatures in my writing …
Whew! That’s a relief. Thanks Sonia.
Jean
Excellent piece. I’m glad you’re back on the “writing about writing” beat.
Continuing with our on-going conversation about how we approach writing, Terry Gross recently interviewed Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. He explained that writing for him is like walking into a dark closet and discovering what’s inside. He doesn’t organize beforehand. He says he just wanders in and discovers what he’s thinking about through his writing. Sounds like an adventure!
Thanks, Peter. I love Foer’s comment. Too bad it wouldn’t quite work for a CEO’s speech or a press release.
Speaking of words, grammar, spelling, etc. my dear blogger, Jean Gogolin, you should edit before you send out a blog, especially when you are writing about the subject you’ve chosen here. You have a sentence that I’m still scratching my head about, trying to make it correct or by seeing something in it, or left out of it, that I’ve missed or overlooked. I really don’t want to make you seem like a person who should swallow his or her own medicine, but the sentence, “After all, aren’t we all trained from childhood to be nice so people like us and want to be our friends”. Is it people “like us” meaning, as we are, or is it people “like us” meaning, so people will like us? There are two ways in which this sentence has (or hasn’t) a meaning. The first thing that I wanted to understand (but was unable), shouldn’t have had an “and”, but instead the word “and” should have been dropped. But then as a second example, I think I finally do see what it was that you wanted us to understand, held two phrases so that the sentence would be interpreted as meaning “so that people like us and (my word insertions in cap’s) TRULY DO want to be our friends”. Even my own sentence construction is confusing. The whole sentence should be re-written.
You haven’t made an enemy of me (I’m not trying to be hostile), but be a bit more careful when you write something, unless you take up writing restaurant menus. In that case, I would just rinse the lemon juice from my eye, laugh, and move on. David
Point taken, David. Rinsing the lemon juice from my eye.