Every now and then, you read a blog post that pisses you off. What makes the piss-off quotient worse is that everybody else thinks the post is wonderful. You start to doubt your opinion. More than that, you start to doubt your hold on reality. But the piss-off factor eats away at you long enough that you decide there must be something to it. So you sit down to your computer and bang out a post like this.
why am i itchy?
I had such a reaction when I read Jody Hedlund’s post titled 3 Blogging Blunders. It’s not that what she writes is wrong; au contraire, it’s all very helpful. And it’s not that I have any cause to dislike Jody Hedlund personally, or anything else that she writes for that matter. It’s more that her post has provoked an allergic reaction. As with an allergy, I reacted to the post in a way that most others don’t. As with an allergy, I must have an idiosyncratic sensitivity. Nevertheless, the hives are real.
The post itself is straight-forward and offers commonsense advice: 1. make your name clearly visible; 2. make it easy for people to contact you; and 3. don’t focus too much on yourself. What gave me the hives was the introduction, in particular, a phrase in its final sentence: “… if we hope to present ourselves as growing professionals in the writing industry, then …”
Writing is an industry. Blogging is part of that industry. Blogging is a profession within that industry. I blog ergo I am a professional.
Excuse me while I put calamine lotion on my hives.
why do we write?
Let me quote something from Margaret Atwood. The reason I defer to Margaret Atwood on this point is that I landed on Hedlund’s page through an Atwood retweet on Twitter, so I blame Atwood for my hives. In the introduction to Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood offers a lengthy and funny list of real reasons writers have cited for writing. Here is a small sampling:
To record the world as it is. To set down the past before it is all forgotten. To excavate the past because it has been forgotten. To satisfy my desire for revenge. Because I knew I had to keep writing or else I would die. Because to write is to take risks, and it is only by taking risks that we know we are alive. To produce order out of chaos. To delight and instruct … To please myself. To express myself. To express myself beautifully. To create a perfect work of art … To name the hitherto unnamed. To defend the human spirit, and human integrity and honor. To thumb my nose at Death. To make money so my children could have shoes. To make money so I could sneer at those who formerly sneered at me. To show the bastards. …
Eventually Atwood gives up in her quest for what might be called the unified field theorem of writers and their motives. What is true of Atwood’s quest in the matter of writing on paper must be doubly true in the matter of writing in bytes.
where is the context?
Let me suggest a fourth blogging blunder: assuming you can safely dispense with context when you write a blog post. This isn’t an original thought of mine. It’s a theme embedded in Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget, which I review here. If blogging has a dark trait, we see it only when blogging gets into bed with search technologies. The offspring of their unholy union is a fragmentation of the way we recount our experience of the world. We land on a page, not because of any commitment on our part, either to the author or to her writing, but because of an accident (or, more frequently, through deliberate manipulation of search returns by those who can afford it), and after we’ve skimmed the page, or half the page, or the first sentence, we move on, never to return.
Hedlund’s post offers a prescription. That’s what professionals do. Doctors do it. Why not bloggers? Her blog is her “office” and she has decorated it so it looks like the kind of office where one can go for a prescription. The assumption is that her prescription has universal application, like penicillin. In other words, it assumes (even as it denies: “There aren’t any hard fast rules about blogging”) that bloggers enjoy a shared context, more or less.
From Hedlund’s post and from doo-dads she uses to decorate her office, this is what I can gather of her context: she won accolades from a contest sponsored by the American Christian Fiction Writers, which probably (though not necessarily) makes her American and Christian; she’s married and has five kids whom she home schools. She’s Caucasian and in her late 30’s or early 40’s. However, some of the context is not deliberate but, like milk rings on the kitchen table, leaves me to draw inferences. For instance, there seems to be an assumption that blogs are successful either to the extent that their value is monetized (e.g. by packaging all those posts and landing a book deal) or to the extent that they monetize the value of something else (e.g. by marketing a book, in Hedlund’s case, a historical romance novel called The Preacher’s Bride).
where is the money?
The problem with professionalizing a blog is that it starts to look like every one of the other 133 million blogs out there. The intentions of one are imputed to all. Everything reduces to abstraction; nothing explodes into particularity. In form (the “office” if you like), a big media blog like Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish at The Atlantic Monthly looks like Ghana-based MyWeku (which improbably claims as its context all of the African continent) which looks like Mind of Mine, the mis-adventures of a UK-based young gay man. WordPress. Blogger. Whatever. They all look reasonably neat and tidy, just like the blog you’re reading now, so they all must want a book deal, right?
Except that motivation is a funny creature. It keeps stumbling over particularity and context. Here is one of Hedlund’s prescriptions: “I’m not an advocate of posting large chunks of our stories within blog posts as a way to get critiques or to get noticed.” I suppose that would be a good prescription if we were all after that book deal. But what about those of us who post large chunks of our stories because the internet is a new medium in its own right, still in its infancy and still in need of those willing to explore its limits? Or what about those of us who post because the internet is exposes the social nature of writing and demystifies the book as a final expression of anything (except perhaps as a commodity)? Or, perhaps most importantly, what about those of us who post large chunks of our stories because story is just about the only weapon we have left to defend ourselves against the alienating abstraction the internet economy is fast becoming?
Or what about writers who simply disagree? Consider that obscure and little known writer, Alice Walker, who wanted to post some of her poems on her web site and found she wasn’t allowed. Presumably, this was a contractual issue with a publisher who preferred that her work not be read. The Poetry Foundation quotes her as saying: “I was so annoyed that I decided to write new poetry and put it on the internet first because I wanted to go directly to people.” It’s difficult to suppose that Alice Walker is motivated by money, since she’s giving away her poetry. It’s equally difficult to suppose that Alice Walker is motivated by the need for attention or adulation, since she’s already got plenty of that. While I can’t pretend to know her motives here, I’m willing to go out on a limb and suggest that they’re more subtle than what we usually suppose of writers who post material online for free.
I’ll close by offering a link to Jaron Lanier’s personal web site where, among other things, he promotes his book. It’s worth the visit. He has his own prescription and, like the good doctor, he swallows his own pills. In effect, his prescription is a middle finger to professionalism. Without context to ground online writing, professionalism is a load of hoo-ha. It’s context that makes our blogging human.
Oh yes. One other thing. After such a rant, I feel obliged to say something about my own motives. I have more than one motive for blogging, but maybe the most compelling is my desire to stay sane. That isn’t just a motive; that’s part of my context too.