Your Blogs: Five Observations
Posted by scottwberg on March 4, 2009
Here, culled from my comments in class last night, are five general observations about your blogs. These observations don’t apply equally to each of your blogs, but they all have the purpose of encouraging you to create an enticing, meaningful, even exceptional collection of writing.
1) Blogs–at least the personal, topic-based blogs you’re all writing–exist in an editor-free zone and need to take as much advantage of that fact as possible. This doesn’t free you from the necessity to, you know, proofread, but it does free your blog from the requirement to adhere to any particular publication’s mission, tone, sense of audience, choice of topics, etc. As I said, if your blog seems too much an imitation of the kinds of writing you might find at one of your favorite magazines or newspapers (online or otherwise), consciously choose to break out of that mold.
2) Set yourself free! I talked about the persistent straightjacket feeling I got from reading some (though certainly not the majority) of your posts, as if you were being too careful to stick to the topic you’ve declared. Having a topic is important, very important, but only in the sense that it provides a home for you, the underpinning for whatever you decide to talk about each writing day. Don’t underestimate the attraction for the reader of a digressive post, one that uses the blog’s topic as only the flimsiest pretext on which to hang your writing.
3) Take full advantage of the flexibility of the form and, again, the absence of an editor looking over your shoulder. (Yes, I’m a form of editor, no denying it, but keep in mind that I’m trying my best to act the part of thoughtful reader.) That means that, say, impressionism or stream of consciousness or mock epic or idle musings or any other stylistic variations are all available to you all the time. Stories might work with a beginning, middle, and end, but they also might work without ends, or beginnings, or middles. Experiments of all kind are open to you.
4) Think about the fact that every blog post you create may bear several phrases, sentences, or paragraphs that might make wonderful entire posts by themselves. Blogs are a wonderful place to chew on a very small thought or moment at length — because “length,” for a blog, doesn’t have to be thousands of words. The zoom lens is one of the most important tools a writer has.
5) Finally, remember that part of creating a voice, persona, point of view is to let us into your life and head a little (or a l0t). You all have multiple threads of thinking and activity in your lives; you’re complex people. Let us see that complexity. Think about yourself; remember that you have a past, and don’t be afraid to visit that past. You all know people that might make interesting recurrent characters, but above all understand that you yourself are the most important interesting recurrent character.
Please be in touch with me if you’d like to engage in some back-and-forth about my individual messages, and remember that revision of previous posts, while not required, is certainly allowed and welcomed.
