Where Did You Get Your Start Writing Online?
We all started somewhere.
Do you ever think back to when you started something important in your life?
Maybe it’s the day you got married or the day your child was born. We’ve all had important moments like this in our lives, and it can be a nice walk down memory lane to think back to when we get started.
Along those same lines, as I was recording a new episode of The Online Writer podcast, I thought back to how I got started writing in the first place.
It got me thinking about where other people got their start in the world of writing online.
I’d love to hear where you first started putting your words out there into the digital world and what made you decide to take that leap!
It all depends on what you mean by 'started'. I cannot really remember when I first started publishing things, but since I've stopped every blog I've written eventually and no traces remain of my writing, it's doubtful whether I really ever started at all. I think that you can only talk about 'starting' looking back at something you put your energy into continuously for a long time. I may talk that way about my marriage, our children, our pets, cycling, choir singing, language learning, reading literature - but writing and publishing online, sadly not yet. It is my biggest goal this year to get into the groove of writing and publishing regularly.
In 1986, my uncle showed me the bulletin boards on GEnie’s ‘internet service’. I could have conversations with virtually anyone, anywhere in the world. Unbelievable!
In 1997, I finally got online on my own. I only knew one website: Yahoo…and only because a TV newscast had it up on a monitor in the background. I got free email and those unlimited meaningful conversations I’d seen a decade earlier. I was a regular on the Christianity message boards under the screen name General Havok. People started asking me for help, wanting to know stuff about the Bible or how to defend their faith.
In 1999, I decided to stop writing the same things over and over and instead publish my answers on my own website. Because I'm a professional web designer, my website got a fair amount of traction... search engines love me. More traffic meant more requests for help, which meant more articles, which meant more traffic, which meant more requests. I'm still a small fish in a big pond, but it keeps me pretty busy.
I joined Substack last year because I want to create some level of community among my readers. When 92% of your traffic comes from new web searches, almost everybody is a stranger. Writing a more personal newsletter is my way of beginning to create community. I'm shocked that some of these strangers are willing to pony up some of their hard-earned dough in response, and would love to be able to devote myself to this kind of service full-time.