My Top Advice for Sobriety Bloggers
If you want to write about addiction, consider these recommendations.
I love writing about sobriety. I started a sobriety blog about two years after I quit drinking, and in the five years since, I’ve written hundreds upon hundreds of posts.
The blog has done extraordinarily well, reaching over 25,000 followers and expanding into this newsletter. Even more importantly, keeping the blog has helped me to stay sober, and, from what readers have told me, it has helped many of them to stay sober too.
Although I know that not everyone loves to write as much as I do, I think that anyone who has quit drinking should at least give it a try. [I explained my thoughts on this in more detail in a newsletter that I sent out last year. You can check it out in the archive: Writing About Sobriety]
Today’s newsletter is a bit of a meta-topic. I’m going to share my advice about how to write about sobriety—specifically, how to write about sobriety for an online audience, such as a blog or newsletter.
These are the lessons that I’ve learned over the past five years, with a focus on how to use your writing to help strengthen your sobriety and help your readers through their struggles.
Tell Your Story
I want to start with the most important piece of advice I have, which is to focus on your sobriety. I’ve written posts about all kinds of sobriety topics—from health statistics to news stories to sober celebrities—but my best posts have also been about my personal sobriety experiences.
The posts in which I turn a critical eye on my addiction and recovery are the ones that have helped me the most. They also tend to be the ones to which readers respond most positively.
I’m not a medical expert or a psychologist—and neither are most of you who are reading this—so my expertise on addiction isn’t from formal education but rather through my lived experiences. As a result, my writing is most interesting and compelling when I stick to what I’ve seen first-hand.
It’s also important to understand that you don’t need to have all the answers. Sometimes, by writing about an issue that I’m currently struggling with, I’m able to clarify my thoughts and come up with a solution. Other times, I’ve published posts without any clear answer, and have received great advice from my readers.
Writing isn’t just a way to explain things we already know—it’s also a way to learn.
For example, writing about my sobriety helped me to recognize the ways that I’ve grown since I quit drinking. When I first started blogging, I used to say all the time that sobriety hadn’t improved my life. However, as I continued to write, I spotted more and more ways in which it had. My conception of sobriety completely transformed.
That brings me to another important point: Don’t be afraid to change your mind.
Of course, it could be annoying if a blogger switches back and forth between conflicting viewpoints every week. However, it’s perfectly OK to change your mind as you learn and experience new things.
Most of us who can maintain long-term sobriety have needed to grow a lot to do so. My personality, my opinions, and my beliefs have all evolved since I quit drinking, and that’s a good thing. It makes sense that I no longer believe all the same things about sobriety that I did when I first started blogging. That’s the result of healthy growth.
I used to be scared that if I ever contradicted my previous posts, readers would be confused or get angry with me. However, readers are far more understanding than we writers often fear.
Helping Your Readers
Speaking of readers, in my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes that most new sobriety bloggers make is that they forget about the readers entirely.
It’s OK if you want to write for just yourself, but in that case, keep it in a journal. If you’re publishing a blog or a newsletter, you’re inviting people to read it, and you owe it to them not to waste their time.
Before I publish anything, I always try to imagine myself in the reader’s shoes, and ask, “Would this be worth reading?”
Even though I draw from my experiences, I try to write about them in a way so that the people reading my blog can learn alongside me. If I write about, for example, the difficulties I experienced during my first few days sober, it’s so that newly sober readers have an idea of what to expect.
One of the keys to helping your readers is to focus on one topic at a time. In this edition of the newsletter, I’m just focused on how to blog about sobriety. In last week’s, my sole focus was overcoming stress.
A lot of new writers try to tell their entire sobriety story in a single post. Unfortunately, to the readers, this often comes across as rambling. It’s easier for them to follow your writing if you keep the scope narrow. If you start straying too far from the original topic, consider breaking it into a separate post.
Another way that I try to make sure my posts are helpful is by thinking about what I read when I first got sober. If a topic was helpful to me, then my take on the topic will likely be helpful to someone else.
With all of this said, I do want to give a quick warning: No matter how well you write, no matter how great your ideas, you can’t please everyone. Especially with a subject as controversial as addiction and sobriety, there are always going to be people out there who disagree with you.
Most people who don’t like your writing will just move on to something else, but if you keep blogging for long, you’re sure to attract a few trolls. These are the readers who post rude, disrespectful, and antagonizing comments on your work.
My best advice for this is to just block and ignore them. I used to waste a lot of time going back and forth with these people, but it never led to anything worthwhile. I was a lot happier when I began ignoring them altogether.
Have Fun
My very last piece of advice is that, as much as possible, you should try to have fun with your writing.
For me, writing is not always fun. There are times when I’m writing about a challenging part of my addiction and it can be emotionally draining. There are other times when I’m not in the mood to write but force myself to do it to stay on schedule.
However, those are the exceptions. Even though writing is not always fun, it normally is. If we go into writing thinking of it as an obligation, we’re unlikely to get nearly as much out of it. Instead, I try to view it as an opportunity.
I see writing as a great chance to quietly reflect and grow—something that most of us need a lot more of in our lives. I hope that you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.
Thank you for reading, and if you have a blog (or start one after reading this post), please feel free to leave a link to it in the comments.