A couple of weeks ago, I went to the Eras Tour. I was at the first night at Wembley Stadium, alongside 88,445 other Taylor Swift fans (they counted), singing my lungs out and dancing like a mad thing. It was wonderful, life-affirming and just bloody good fun. And now I’m back at my desk, thinking about how to mine the experience for content.
If you Google ‘turning personal experiences into content’, you’ll find lots of articles about how to do it, but few about why we do, or whether we should. That got me thinking about the whole concept of using your life for content – and so here I am, wondering aloud, while I remember my evening screaming songs I’ve loved for years alongside tens of thousands of other people who all know the words.
What’s the angle?
The key piece of advice I came across for making content out of your personal experiences was to find an angle. After all, literally thousands of people saw the same concert on the same night as I did – so how can I write about it in a way that others will find interesting?
The obvious answer, since my blog is related to my work as an editor/proofreader, is to connect it to my job somehow – narrow down the audience to a particular niche and do my damnedest to appeal to them. Here are some of the angles I considered for this post:
- Kill your darlings: like Taylor Swift choosing the set list for the Eras Tour, you need to decide what to cut and what to keep from your work to tell a coherent and entertaining story.
- Typos and Taylor Swift: a brief history of typos and spelling mistakes in band merchandise.
- Taylor Swift is a proofreader at heart: how Taylor Swift intentionally uses formatting to drop Easter eggs for her fanbase.
How specific do I want to be though? Mightn’t it be better to write something with wider appeal – something content creators across all kinds of fields, not just editing, might want to read? A meta-post about writing content about personal experiences, for example?
Why use your life for content?
It makes sense that, when we come to write content, we reach for our personal experiences as inspiration. The adage is ‘write what you know’, after all. Life can give us a never-ending source of stuff to write about, because there’s always something to think about or worry over or tease apart or ask people for help with.
Our personal lives can also give us the stories that generate the strongest emotions in us. If you need to produce content regularly, especially within a limited field or topic, the well can easily dry up after a while (case in point, I used to write blogs for a homewares website, and it didn’t take long before I ran out of ways to connect light fixtures to love for Valentine’s Day). Personal stories, however, are the currency of our social lives – they make us feel things (good or bad), and telling stories to other people and listening to theirs bonds us together. If we want to create engaging, emotional content, what better way than to make it personal?
Indeed, this is exactly what Taylor Swift’s popularity is built on: she takes her personal experiences and writes about them in a way that feels universal. Her fans don’t turn out in their droves just because she writes catchy tunes, but because she sings about experiences that many of us can relate to – love, heartbreak, friendship, feelings of inadequacy… Swift is the queen of mining your personal life for ‘content’ – not in a way that’s soulless or cynical, but in a way that makes her fans truly feel.
Should we do it?
I think, when it comes down to it, there are a few things we should ask ourselves before we take the personal and use it for content:
- Who is this content for? Consider who your audience is. Are you sharing this content just among friends, or in a professional capacity? Are you more likely to receive understanding or criticism in return? Is there a possibility that this content will be reshared beyond the platform you originally posted it on? It’s good to ask yourself all of these questions before you put something out there, because the type of audience you have will have different implications for what and how much you share.
- How much should I share? One of the biggest dangers with making personal content is the risk of oversharing. If you reveal too much online, you can be left feeling exposed, especially if your audience isn’t who you thought they were, or if you share unfinished ideas and later change your mind. Everyone’s comfort levels around how much to share will be different, but tread carefully and check in with yourself at every stage to make sure you’re still happy to go ahead.
- Why am I doing this? If you do decide to use a personal experience for content, it’s probably best if you have a strong reason for doing so – one that you genuinely believe in. It can be as simple as ‘because I think people might find this funny/interesting/useful’, or for more complex and personal reasons like ‘I will find it empowering to publicly reclaim this experience for myself’ – but ultimately you do need to believe in why you’re doing it. Sure, sometimes we have to make content to tick a box or fulfil a quota; not everything we produce can be heartfelt and deeply personal. I just think that if you do mine your personal life for content you don’t really believe in, it will feel worse than if you had based it on something less intimate or exposing. Save the personal stuff for the things that are important to you.
So why did I choose to write this particular post? Because I want to write content that appeals to Swifties? Because I want to flex that I went to the Eras Tour? Because I want to connect my name to a highly searchable keyword term? Sure, probably a little bit of all of those things – but also because I find the question of what and what not to share intensely interesting, and I wanted to talk about it in the context of a singer-songwriter who has taken that question and turned it into art.
What do you think about using personal experiences for content? How much do you feel comfortable sharing online, and for what purposes? Comment below, I’d love to keep the discussion going!
Clare Diston 