Writing What I Don’t Suck At

I’ve had this blog up for just over ten years. In that time, I’ve sort of talked about a lot of things, like the Second Amendment and related issues, the funeral industry, Only Ones, fulltime RV life, constitutional issues like eminent domain or gay marriage and a few other topics. That’s how I came up with “Indefixa” as a blog title. It’s pseudo-Latin for “unfocused,” and that fit my blogging style. I didn’t really have a platform. I talked about whatever my outrage du jour was. I thought it was a cool gimmick.

The result was that instead of doing a nice broad-featured blog with lots of content, I didn’t write much at all, because there was so much to write about that I couldn’t choose a topic for a post.

And I still wanted to tell stories. That’s finally come into focus for me. There are too many stories out there.

Rachel Thompson has a great guide for writers looking for blog topics, and in it, she talks about your voice. “What are you passionate about?” she asks.

I heard a great corollary to that the other day from Jason Collington, web editor of the Tulsa World. He spoke in my Intro to Mass Communication class and shared this nugget of wisdom: “Figure out what you suck at. Don’t do that.”

I sucked at writing without a focal point. Without a voice. Without identifying what I was passionate about. So I’m not going to do that anymore.

What am I passionate about? What is it that horrifies and disgusts me, and makes me want to work toward solving it, or eradicating it?

Three things:

• Human trafficking. More people are being bought and sold today than were ever enslaved back in the 17^th and 18^th centuries combined. The Sad Girl barely scratches the surface of the issue.
• Wrongful convictions. The National Registry of Exonerations lists 1,684 exonerations, as of 23 October 2015. That means that in almost 1,700 cases since 1956, authorities identified and prosecuted the wrong person. That leads into cold cases, because if the wrong person went to jail, then the real bad guy is still out there.
• Police Misconduct. Police officers are human beings, and they have a job that regularly brings them into intimate contact with the dregs of society. But “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” Officers who break the law must not be able to hide behind the blue wall of silence.

Is this all I’m going to write about? No. But it’s going to be a lot of what I write about.

It’s going to be my voice.