What can a movie tell us about blogging? When one of the central stories revolves around a blog, quite a bit. And when that movie happens to be “Julie and Julia,” one can learn all sorts of positive lessons as the plot unfolds.
In case you haven't seen it, “Julie and Julia” tells two true stories. The first one, about Julia Child, reveals how she became a chef and came to write her classic book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The second one tells us about Julie Powell, an office worker involved with the aftermath of 9-11, who one day decides to give herself a year to cook her way through every recipe in Child's cookbook – and blog about it. It's actually a lot more interesting than my quickie synopsis might indicate; both women go through a number of trials as they try to reach their goals.
It's Julie's story that concerns us here. How did a woman who'd only ever written half of a novel go from nothing to publishers seeking her out with book offers? The answer is in her blog, which you can still find online, from the very first entry on forward. Julie was in search of a challenge to pull her out of “secretary ennui,” as she describes it in one of her entries, and boy, did she pull it off!
The answer is also in the move, of course, distilled by Hollywood. So what lessons can we learn to help make our own blogs great? Watching the movie, and thinking about it later, I found eleven. Four of them I'll cover here, with the remainder to come in the second part of this article.
Be passionate about your subject. Julie described herself in her first blog entry as a “government drone by day, renegade foodie by night.” In the movie, when she's discussing a possible topic for her blog with her husband, they're eating – and actively enjoying – a delicious meal. As with Julia Child herself, you can sense her love and passion for food permeating the atmosphere.
If you want your blog to sing, you need to bring that kind of spirit to it. Hint: if you love doing something enough that you're determined to do your best with sub-par equipment until you can afford the good stuff, you may be onto something. Bonus points if it's something you actively make time for on an already-busy weekend.
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