It’s All About the Writing

From time to time we like to take a break from wowing you with our genius and creative (and geniusly creative) projects and talk about blogging itself. The reality of a DIY blog is that it’s fueled by home improvement projects, but it’s just as much about writing and photography at the end of the day. We’ve posted before about blogging photography (what we’ve learned about it, and how much it’s changed), and so today we wanted to focus in on the writing side of things.

We both love writing, which is a big part of what makes this blog sustainable. It’s also a shared passion and commitment that we see as a crucial part of “brand” at Plaster & Disaster — we both want to share quality projects, but we also want to write about them in compelling and entertaining ways. Sure not every post is Pulitzer Prize Winning (and rightly so… “And the Pulitzer Prize goes to ‘Turning a Plastic Cactus Into a Side Table‘” would reflect a terrible decline of journalistic standards), but we do take pride in trying to write engagingly while also walking through projects clearly so you might be able to replicate them at home were you so inclined.

A few months ago Naomi wrote a post about blogs outside of DIY land that inspire her with their writing, and today we wanted to turn the focus inward and reflect on some of the posts we’re proudest of for their writing. If you’re feeling like we should take a step back and eat a piece of humble pie before we go patting ourselves on the backs for being such awesome essayists, we can all take a moment to first re-read our post this winter about posts we regret.

Naomi

By far my favorite post to write was about the graphic mugs that I made for my Dad, featuring the punchlines of the jokes we tell each other.  Sharing wisdom through jokes is a big part of our family tradition, and so this was meaningful to write and spend time on.

The post opened with a hook to get people reading, explained why it is personally important, gave the “how-to” of the project, and ended with a way for readers to engage in the comments.  Ideally all blog posts would do all those things, but it can be surprisingly tricky!  Also, in writing out the jokes that inspired each of the mugs, I finally put in writing some stories that I’ve been telling/hearing verbally.  It was an interesting and fun writing exercise to “codify” the set-ups and narratives that I’ve experimented with and heard others experiment with for years.

Another post I’m really happy with is the harrowing tale of mishap and dashed expectations that was my attempt to fix the gaping hole in the wall of my bedroom by installing a wall grate.

It was a pretty dumb story, but I wanted to show the humor and frustration of those DIY projects where problems build and build and never seem to come out right.  I think we’ve all been there!  Even though it wasn’t fun to live, the post was fun to write (which is often a good indication that it might be fun to read), and I think illustrated how one problem just led to another!  And, most importantly, I got to make some grate puns along the way 🙂

Sage

Believe it or not, my favorite post of all time to write was a tutorial about installing a toilet. It combined all my favorite things in the world: DIY, self-deprecating humor, and sarcasm. You see, this was no ordinary toilet installation post. It was a post about how not to install a toilet, and it ended with me spending hundreds of dollars on two plumbers and still having a broken toilet.

I just had so much fun writing this post to read like a regular tutorial, except that anyone reading even moderately closely would realize that things were rapidly going off the rails. It was one of our first opportunities to show people that a) we have very little idea what we’re doing and we make mistakes all the time, and b) if we can’t wow you with talent and creativity, we’re at least going to try to make you laugh.

Another one of my favorite posts to write had nothing to do with DIY — it was about the concept of “flow,” which is something that I’ve used to understand myself better and to drive a lot of my decision-making in recent years.

It was also about one of my tattoos.

I really enjoyed writing this post because these are some deeply personal and complex concepts for me — and the challenge of figuring out how to explain them in a coherent and compelling way was one I relished. I’m not sure if readers found it meaningful, but it felt important for me to put those ideas out there to share a more holistic version of myself.

Collaborative

But as much as we’re proud of our individual writing, one of the most fun parts of this blog is the fact that we get to work on posts together.  Our writing is definitely strongest when we work collaboratively to pull together a good story, add humor, and remove the parts that are dumb or don’t make sense.

One of our favorite posts (not projects… definitely not our favorite project…) was the story of our participation in a competition to make home decor out of kitchen utensils. If this sounds like a bit of a disaster, it was.

While neither of us are proudly displaying a starburst mirror made out of silverware in our homes, we are proud of the way we shared how much fun we had with this project through our write-up of our brainstorming trip and decapitation of many innocent forks and spoons.  It can be hard to translate those “you had to be there” moments into writing!  Also, if you read this post carefully, you’ll see the origin of our ongoing jokes about dollhouses and tiny things, which led to our inevitable purchase of a dollhouse collaboration with some tiny bloggers.

Another one of our favorite posts to write was our 2016 design trends predictions. We wrote this one sitting side-by-side on Naomi’s couch, riffing off one another about the absurdity of the DIY blogging world.

The only way we can stay sane in DIY blogland is to mercilessly make fun of it (and ourselves), and this was a really entertaining post to write as we thought about what was both funny and disturbingly possible (rose quartz sheepskin pouf, we’re looking at you).

We’ve always said that we’re not going to be the people you come to for the most incredible transformations or creative projects (though we try), but we hope that if we put out posts that are entertaining to read, you’ll stick with us even when our projects are disasters and our kitchens have no floors for months on end.

So what do you think — does writing matter as much as we think it does? What’s your favorite blog, and do you read it for the projects or the stories?