Creative blogging strategies: Oblique Strategies

Blogging can be tough. It's hard work coming up with clever things to say, interesting tidbits to post week in, week out. Any blogger who's been blogging for a while knows the feeling of 'blogger's block'!

Don't worry, you're not alone if you've experienced a blogging malaise. Creative people have been developing strategies for overcoming the blocks, dead ends and barriers that hinder great work for centuries.

One of the most famous was developed in the 1970s by musician and record producer Brian Eno: A deck of cards named Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas.

Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards, each card containing a piece of advice, an aphorism or question designed to jolt the user into approaching the problem from a different angle, including:

• Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
• Put in earplugs.
  
• Retrace your steps.
• Do nothing for as long as possible.
• Ask people to work against their better judgment
  

Eno stated in an interview that:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."

Consulting Eno's Oblique Strategies may not work for you, but perhaps developing your own way of introducing random elements into your blogging process could help you to achieve better results. Or perhaps simply wearing earplugs while you blog will be enough...

Creative blogging strategies: Rules

In 1969 French writer Georges Perec wrote a novel titled A Void. Now, A Void contains all the things novels usually contain: plots and sub-plots, twists, characters, intrigue and so on, but it is missing one very important element. Unlike probably every other novel ever written it does not contain the letter 'e'.

When he began writing, Perec created a rule that the letter 'e' would not appear anywhere in the book. Why would a writer do such a thing, you might ask; why would he make things even more difficult for himself?

The answer is that Perec was part of a group of writers who thought that placing constraints on their writing was a great way to come up with new ideas and to force them to think about things in an unconventional way.
Writing a novel without the letter 'e' is an extreme example, but there are many ways working to rules or placing contraints on your blog could help you come up with great ideas and make your blog more interesting and unique.

For example:

• Limit yourself to one medium, ie writing, video or photography - can you make your point by only using images?
  
• If your blog is for a business, you could try excluding all mentions of your product or service - this would force you to talk around the topic, exploring the issues on the periphery (which might be being ignored by your competition!)
• Limit the colour scheme: black and white, green and blue: what would your blog look like if every image you posted had to have something green in it?
• Create a rule that you must sit down and post at the same time every day or the same time every week (will you work better when 'forcing' yourself to be creative rather than sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike?)
  

Of course, rules are made to be broken. And the decision to finally break a rule might lead you to new inspiration. It might even spur you on in the opposite direction, like Perec, who went on to write The Exeter Text in 1972, a novel where the only vowel used is the letter 'e'.