Blogging vs. Writing
Among my favorite writers is Robin Hobb, whom I discovered entirely accidentally while trawling the shelves at the library looking for something — anything! — to read that wasn’t 1) something I had already read, 2) overly worthy and tome-like or 3) in rhyme. It took me three tries to get into the book I chose (Assassin’s Apprentice) but then once I had, I wandered around the house with the book in my hand and my nose in the book, ignoring most (all right, all) small cries for attention and cooking with the spare hand. And then, glory be! there were eight more books all set in the same world. Heaven, I tell you.
It was around this time that I managed to formulate what I dislike about short stories, that is, that they’re short. I invest in the world I’m reading into. I read to grow attached to the characters, to explore their world, inner and outer. I want to know more, sit by the fire with them and hear story after story. Short stories leave me cold because just as I am beginning to grow attached, just as I begin to feel the words fold over my head and that warm, welcome sense of vanishing entirely from this world into another begins to take hold — BOOM. It’s over and that world is closed to me. It’s like an unsatisfactory one night stand versus something that at least suggests future possibilities.
But I digress. The point I wanted to make about Robin Hobb is that she detests blogging as a distraction from writing: you can read her whole rant here. Indeed, it is called Rant. She pleads with writers to write, rather than to expend their energy in blogging, which she sees as a poor substitute for actually working on whatever project is at hand.
I have some sympathy with her point. When I was parenting 70 million hours out of every twenty-four, blogging that life was an utter relief — and provided me with an outlet for writing that I found undemanding and nonjudgmental. I had no word-count to reach, no great novel to expel. It was in and of itself, a perfect end. Now that I am parenting a more sensible twenty hours a day, I am writing again — and blogging markedly less. There is a terrible trick that blogging plays on me which is that, when I blog, I feel as if I have actually done my writing for the day and that now I’m off the hook, when of course, I’m not. But something in my head goes BING! and I suddenly find myself wandering off to get coffee in a smug haze of self-congratulatory achievement.
Yet I admire — and am amazed by — those writers who not only write every day but blog. And twitter. Lots. I honestly don’t know how they manage it. I am thinking of people like Elana Johnson, Johanna Harness, Julie Butcher, Inkygirl and AuthoressAnon and oh, I don’t know. A hundred others. These writers are good, working writers AND they manage wonderful web-presences and lively correspondence with others. Well, wow, is all I’m saying.
Perhaps the days of writing in a Parisian garret, alone with oneself and the scratch of pen on paper, are truly over. The sticky, connecting, enticing world-wide web invites writing — or at least, writers — into a lively, social whirl, warm, supportive and encouraging. A cocktail party of words and wordsmiths.
Yet, in the end, we write alone, fingers on keys, a hand moving pen across paper. Writing at its very core is the teasing out of woolly thought into long, smooth yarns — and too much distraction tangles the emerging thread. I am still working to find the balance in my own pen-in-hand life between garret skritching and virtual society.
But why does blogging have to be different? I have two blogs, one of which is dedicated to all of my own stories—so, yeah, I consider it actual writing if I write a story and then post it . . .
You make a good point about blogging fiction — which is something I have rarely done. And that does count, clearly. But blogging for me is closer to journaling — and does not get the novel finished. Or maybe it does, by keeping the writing moving. Hmmm. Food for thought.