“And it occurred to me that there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing — writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology.” Simon Dumenco, writer/blogger with Advertising Age
Well, I’m back. Short story: I’ve been “occupying” or at least boycotting my former Internet service provider for poor customer service and for billing for services not rendered. If the proper reparations are not soon manifest, I’ll have to go on the public warpath and will probably post. Lucky you! (Sorry, but sometimes one – especially one of the 99% – has to use all the tools at hand.) Meanwhile, after much research, I found new provider that has – according to online reviews and polling of friends – a better ethic.
Most immediately, I plan to catch up with you guys and don’t plan to do that much in the way of posting my writing. First, I look forward to finding out what I missed in your blogs – your lives, your wisdom, your art – over the past month. There’s always the riches of family, friends, books, music, and shows, but there was still a vacuum created during the month I disconnected myself in protest. For your notes and comments: thank you! And now I will happily …
THE GREAT FUN OF THE BLOGGING HOBBY IS IT COMBINES CREATIVITY WITH SOCIAL NETWORKING AND SELF-EDUCATION. The operative word in that statement is “fun.” So much so that …
As I write this, WordPress.com alone hosts 72,467,611 sites with over 351 million people viewing more than 2.5 billion pages each month. WordPress.com users produce about 500,000 new posts and 400,000 new comments on an average day. While not all of these are personal (hobbyist) blogs, it’s probably safe to guess that most are. [Those stats found HERE.]
UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
professional view
Hobbyist Bloggers Are Us: Personal blogging is a mostly American phenomenon, but it’s a recreational pastime that is gaining greater interest across the globe.
Using five measures of the NEO Personality Inventory, two sociological studies of American bloggers determined that individual differences based on the Big Five factors [neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness] can predict who among us is likely to blog. It may not surprise you to learn that “openness to new experience” is a trait those of us who gravitate to blogging are likely to have. It might dismay you to learn that “high in neuroticism” is also one of our traits.
NONPROFESSIONAL OPINION
this would be me: I beg to differ
My best nonprofessional (I’m not a social scientist) and totally biased opinion about who blogs and why: My perception is that it is an outlet for the creative impulse, sharing information, and networking with people who have the same interests. This is an admittedly narrow view: My focus is writers and poets, amateur and professional. I don’t generally read mommy blogs or web journals or other such.
As an inveterate reader of blogs, bloggers seem to be as rich with family and friends and spiritual support as any other group with which I’m involved, but they are often solitary when it comes to an interest in poetry, reading, photography or art and so on. Even when they live in a densely populated area, there may be no access to poetry groups, writers’ groups, or book clubs. Blogs then become a meeting place for these shared interests. While we could share our poems, essays, or fiction with family and friends, this sharing may not be well-received and anyway – why? The idea of constantly pulling out our poems or other creative efforts to show at every gathering doesn’t necessarily appeal. It feels rather like the creative version of multilevel marketing wherein you display whatever you’re selling, corner your best friends, and impose on them to buy.
It is also clear that some bloggers are using their blogs to practice their English skills, hone their writing skills, and get feedback on their work. For writers (amateur or professional) there is no better discipline than forcing oneself to produce consistently and on schedule. Blogging provides a good structure for this. It is also an excellent place to test our more creative experiments.
VALUE ADDED
whole world living
Bloggers often engage in whole-world living. With a growing international base, what an education to visit the sites of people around the world who are just regular folks – like neighbors – and not personalities, politicians, or commercial interests. The perspective from the ground is refreshing, informative, and sometimes inspiring. There are heroes everywhere.
HONOR AMONG BLOGGERS
to paraphrase John Locke, access is not license
Just my opinion ~ Personal pride and honor as well as respect for the original creative works of others – often born of long hard hours – dictates courtesy when reblogging or otherwise introducing a work: acknowledgement, link backs, by lines, and copyrights protections are always in order regardless of circumstance.
I am proud of our blogging community where, except in very rare cases, you will find refined moral compass, personal dignity, and the rights and concerns of others are respected. Professionalism (used here in the sense of competence and conduct, not occupation) is always in order for personal bloggers like us as well as the pro-bloggers.
PERSPECTIVES ON WRITING AND THE WRITING LIFE ARE ALWAYS WELCOME and for me never more so than those presented in The Paris Review The Art of Fiction interviews. All the interviews from 1953 through 2011 are now posted online – no searching through stacks at used bookstores or libraries to find old issues – and no charge. It’s a wonderful resource. Generally you get a back story on a career and sometimes on a book. You’ll learn how other writers manage their days and their projects. Some writers will irritate you and others will charm you. Some will leave you cold and some will spark the writing fire. No matter what, you’ll learn from each interview.
NOVEL PURSUITS
I think Jonathan Franzen‘s youthful experience at home is one with which many people can sympathize. If that’s so in your case, it might be nice for you to know that someone else got through it and got published.
“I hate the word creative, but it’s not a bad description of my personality type, and there was no place for that in my parents’ house. They considered art of all kinds, including creative writing, frivolous. Art was something I could do in my free time, and if I could get school credit for it, so much the better. But it was actively discouraged.”
LETTERS OF ACCEPTANCE
Truman Capote‘s story shows us that even things beyond our dreams can happen.
“I realized that I wanted to be a writer. But I wasn’t sure I would be until I was fifteen or so. At that time I had immodestly started sending stories to magazines and literary quarterlies. Of course no writer ever forgets his first acceptance; but one fine day when I was seventeen, I had my first, second, and third, all in the same morning’s mail. Oh, I’m here to tell you, dizzy with excitement is not mere phrase!”
SHORT STORY vs. NOVEL
Ray Bradbury is going strong at 91. Here’s some good advice from his 2010 interview:
“…the problem of the novel is to stay truthful. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours … write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being . . two or three thousand words in a few hours is not hard. . . If you carry a short story over to the next day you might intellectualized something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.
“But a novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it.”
THE FINAL PAGES
Ann Beattie doesn’t produce as much as she used to, but she’s still writing and she had ideas and insights to share in her 2011 interview.
“I hate to summarize my stories at the end, because I know that stories don’t really have conclusions. It’s only an appropriate moment for stopping. For a while, I would find the typewriter keys had stopped and decide that that would quite suffice. For most of my stories, intellectually I could contrive a superior ending, but I try to resist that temptation. In general I end my stories before I get a change to do something more aesthetically pleasing to me. But I’ve thrown whole stories away when all I lacked was a last line. Often.”
ON GETTING STARTED
I saved the best for last. I like John Steinbeck. I think I came to Steinbeck at fifteen. I had seen a rerun of the movie The Grapes of Wrath (1940) on television and just went from there. I spent the whole of my fifteenth summer reading him and reading about him. Loved The Grapes of Wrath. I loved every book, and I think I learned something about writing from reading them. Ray Bradbury said of Steinbeck, “I learned from John Steinbeck how to write objectively and yet insert all of the insights without too much extra comment.”
In the fall of 1968, Steinbeck was actually too ill for a standard interview and one was pieced together from the East of Eden diaries (Journal of a Novel) and from some letters, which were later collected and published in one book.
Steinbeck’s Paris Review, The Art of Fiction interview included these six tips:
“1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it—bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue—say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.”
The current issue of Paris Review (which is not online) includes interviews with Bret Easton Ellis (The Art of Fiction) and Terry Southern (The Art of Screenwriting).
