Fragments From Floyd

Hey! Pretty creepy that you posted this entry "about" me while I was commenting on your soup entry. Guess we're both early birds. Here in NH, it's raining with the temp just at freezing: slippery. I need to tear myself from the computer to go to the grocery store to beat the Christmas Eve rush. I need to get food to make, yeah, you guessed it, SOUP. The world's a small, surprising place.

Why blog? A question deserving of a more thoughtful answer than perhaps I have time for on Christmas Eve, so here's a few random snippets. These aren't reasons I started blogging; these are surprise bonuses I wasn't expecting:

This one is more relevant to me than to someone who already writes - it's helped me clarify and structure thoughts.

Through adopting a blogger's-eye-view of the world I've become more aware, more mindful (on good days!)

I've found a wonderful community of interesting like-minded people.

It gives near-real-time windows into corners of the globe that completely bypass normal media.

Yes, it is time-consuming, not to say addictive (be warned!) but it's also enormously enriching and rewarding. It's difficult now to imagine life without it...

I respond here as someone who, last September, decided my blog was taking entirely too much time from my "real" writing, and so said Sayonara...and then, a month and a half later, took up keyboard and mouse again because...well, I missed it.

Unlike other commentors here, I haven't really found the community of like-minded bloggers. The very idea of blog branding makes my bile rise in my throat.

Blogging bypasses the gatekeepers of published thought and just puts our words out there. Those who find readers do so for all the complex and intriguiging reasons that any piece of prose finds readers: having clarity, purpose, resonating on some level with the reader, being well-written or passionate or simply weird, quirky, full of marvels.

Blogging is a cousin of the newspaper column, in length and regularity of appearance. It is a direct descendant of the political and religious pamphlet. It might even claim some ancestry in the Christmas letter. The blog is more varied than the first and second, more frequent than the last. Let us give credit, also, to the barber shop, the local pub, the village fountain, the wide place in the river where the women wash their clothes.

As a communication device, the blog provides near-instant feedback through the comments and email (whenever addresses are posted), something only face-to-face contact and telephones used to do. In this way, the network of people talking to one another with some degree of informality has extended, circled the world, in fact. A treasure.

Blogging is raising your voice. When we blog, we also raise our own consciousness; we begin to pay attention. "Should" someone start a blog? is the same question as "Should I write?" The answer, from those of us who are tortured writers is, "If you can NOT write, don't." On the other hand, if you are compelled and obsessed, nothing (1) can keep you from it. Just don't add a blog to an overwhelmed life to give yourself something else to give short shrift to and then feel guilty about. There's already too much of this sort of thing out there, at Christmas, on weekends, even on blogs.

(1)You can be obsessed and still not write. that's called writer's block. "Writer's block," said short-story author Grace Paley at a conference I attended, "is an unwillingness to tell the truth."

Trish,
Thanks for that quote on writer's block by Grace Paley. My personal experience confirms that as correct.

Her quote, however, does not address the basic reason for the unwillingness to tell the truth, which is fear or shyness, which is just a lesser intensity of fear.

As for Blog branding, that is just being "you" so that people can know what to expect. It is a modern term that really means "will meet expectations." That's not really a bad thing, you know.

I got no quarrel with being oneself, on or offline. Its modernity may be what puts me off, but I suspect it's more the idea--implicit in its advertising origins--that we can manipulate others to seek us out because of some simplification of who we are.

In my own (considerable) experience with writer's block, I'm most likely not even to realize what I'm not willing to tell the truth about. Asking myself the question: What is the truth here that I'm not telling? often reveals to me the hidden stories, the fears, the insecurity, the changes I need to be making to stay true to myself.