“It must be like therapy for you.” 

I get this comment a lot, and I admit, it baffles me.

Do you know how much therapists earn?  Do you know why?

Because it’s boring, listening to people’s problems.  It’s work.  For it to be an effective exercise, the listener has to have a great deal of training and expertise.

Blogging is not therapy.  And if it were?  — The blogger would not be the patient, she would be the caregiver. 

Blogging is for the reader.   (Unless you don’t want a devoted readership, in which case go ahead and therapy yourself away).

The conflict — the challenge as a writer and an artist — is that there is nothing more deadly-dull than a blogger with all the answers.  You have to draw a balance between giving your reader a plateful of problems and fistful of solutions.

The answer is questions.

When structuring a post for your reader, one good trick is to identify a question you are struggling with.

For example — Is blogging therapy?

And then write a post about your exploration of that question.  You can do it chronologically — “When I started blogging I struggled with the narcissism of personal writing, so I decided to read personal essays and determine the history of the form.  This led me to think about the difference betwen good writing and bad, and that good writing is always a gift to the reader.”  Or, you can do it in order of importance.  “Blogging is not therapy, here’s three reasons why not.”

Keep your post limited to one question, to an exploration of the question that raises ideas and supports those ideas with evidence (even if all of that comes in the form of a story.)   Remember to show your reader your struggle without burdening her with a litany of problems on top of her own.

And at the end?  Give her a takeaway.  Tell her what the purpose of the post was, why it was worth your time to write it and hers to read it. 

Tell her the moral of the story.

Because blogging is not therapy, and you are expected to come to the form with some refined thoughts about the questions you’re addressing.