advice

Solving a few blogging problems.

I’ve gotten stuck. First with drawing and later with writing my reviews of other art sites.
It took me a few weeks to figure out what was going wrong and how I should deal with it.

Getting rid of a drawing

I was in the middle of a hatching exercise when I lost interest. I just didn’t feel like finishing this drawing.
For a while I thought that it might have to do something with the time of the year or with the wheather. I do tend to loose interest when skies turn gray. Something which happens every winter here in the Netherlands. But the summer has started and the skies are blue and sunny but still I don’t feel like finishing this drawing.

I don’t know whether it has something to do with autism or if it’s just my personality, but I feel that you should always finish what you start. Before I can start a new drawing I have to finish this one.
Only thing is that I won’t.
Earlier this week I remembered that I have been in this situation before. Not with drawing but with other hobbies of mine. Reading for instance. Sometimes I would start a book. Read a few pages and then stop. And then the book would just sit there. Waiting for me to finish it. While that book sat there I wouldn’t start an other book. I couldn’t. I felt I had to finish this one before I could start an other one.
Usually as a child I read books I had borrowed from the library. After three weeks I had to return them and get a new bunch of books.
After getting rid of the book I couldn’t finish I could again start reading.

I’ve been thinking about what is wrong with this drawing. I’m not sure. Maybe I don’t like the colors or maybe I have had it with practicing hatching for now.
I don’t know. But what ever it is in stead of waisting a lot of time trying to figure it out, I can better just start with the next one.

Hatching trees

Don’t listen to advice

I’ve been reading a lot of advice about how to write better blog posts.
One advice is to take your time. Spread the writing of an article over a few days. That way you have time to re-think your article.
I have tried that technique with personal posts and with posts about drawings but it never sat very good with me. With personal posts I find that I loose the train of my thoughts if I don’t finish the post in one go. And with posts about drawing I find that there isn’t enough to say to warrant so much trouble for one post.
But a few weeks ago I decided that it might be a good idea for my review articles.
Watching a sites I want to review I often find that I have idea in my head of which I don’t know how to describe them. I thought that I might improve on my posts if I were to leave a few days between the selection of the sites I wanted to review and the writing of the post. A few days to gather my thoughts.

But it didn’t work. Instead of improving my articles I felt that they became worse.
It took me a while to figure out what was going wrong. It isn’t that my article became worse, they stay more or less the same. The problem is that my expectations became so much bigger that my articles felt worse.
Being autistic means that the ideas I have about sites usually come in the form of pictures. Most of the time I have a hard time translating those pictures to words. Taking a few days longer doesn’t make it any easier and doesn’t make the translation any better.

As good as this advice might be for other people I’ll go back to doing it my own way.

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You should do…

I’ve never been very good at taking advice. People would tell me how to do something and I’d try my own methods and they would call me stubborn for not taking advice.

There’s a lot of advice floating around on the Internet about the best methods to get a lot of people to visit your website. You should concentrate all your efforts on one subject. If you want to write about two subjects. Fine. But not on one website. Built a second website to talk about your second subject.
But since I don’t take advice I’ve been thinking about all the subjects I could talk about on this website. And in doing so I run in to something of a brick wall. There are thousands of subjects about which I could talk. But there’re only a few subjects of which I know enough to make my writings really interesting.

I been asking myself why it’s so difficult to make a choice between taking the advice and, maybe, creating a website that a lot of people will visit or being stubborn and doing things my way.

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An example

Looking to my stats it’s certainly true that most people reach this blog looking for something that has to do with drawing. But couldn’t that just be something of a self fulfilling prophecy. I write a lot about “drawing” so I’ll attract a lot of people who are looking for the subject “drawing”. If I where to write a lot about “cars” I would attract people looking for the subject “cars”.
Some time ago I tried to draw an excavator and a few people from Russia came looking for “drawing excavators”.

This morning I got to think that something else might be going on:
There are several hundreds of millions pages on the Internet but if you’re Googling for “drawing excavator” you’ll get to the 7th page before you’ll even find anything that’s remotely about drawing. Everything before that has to do with building excavators.
After I realized that, I thought that maybe the advice isn’t so much about what I’m offering. It’s about what people are looking for.

The next step is comparing the subjects I offer to the subjects people are looking for.

What do I write about?

Drawing
Autism
Me
Promen (the sheltered workplace in Gouda)
What ever comes to mind.

How does that compare to the subject people are looking for.

Hundreds of thousands of people are looking for the way to draw portraits, trees, cars and a few Russians want to know how to draw excavators.
Thousands of people want information about autism.
A few of my colleagues’s and family members know I write a blog. But usually they have the URL so they won’t be looking for me on a search engine.
A few hundred people a year are put on Promen’s waiting list. They might be looking for information about Promen.
What ever comes to mind is so vague that I can’t expect people are looking for it.

What’s the problem?

So why do I have such a hard time following this advice? Why, in general, do I have such a hard time following advice?

After thinking about that for a while I realized that is because most advice doesn’t hold true for me. People advice my to use skills I never learned. They don’t consider advising me to use skills I do know. Neither do they help me acquire the skills I miss. They just tell me I’m stubborn for not doing what I’m told.

It’s like telling someone with a spinal cord lesion that the best way to get to the second floor is to scale the stairs.
Which of course is the problem. Nobody knew that I had autism. I didn’t know. But now I do. Now I can start judging which skills I’ve learned, which skills I should learn and which skills are impossible for me to learn.

It also means that I should start thinking about which advice I should follow and which advice I won’t follow.

In this case it’s clear that I should follow the advice about what to write about on my blog: Mainly about drawing, the skills involved in drawing and the way I conceptualize drawings. Secondly about how autism and other circumstances influence the drawings I make.

Tentacles

After trying for a few days to draw a color fountain I felt I should try to do something else with the connection between water and colors. Maybe I can have colors flow in a kind of river.
To try this I made this drawing.

Tentacles

But as always when I start out with thinking of a title instead of just drawing one of the pictures in my mind, I’m finding the drawing won’t fit the title. Since the drawing is much more important that the title I’ve changed the title.

Link

Wasted beauty is beautiful site with eerie pencil drawings.