October 27, 2005

I write therefore I blog?

If you are a political pundit you write a blog to change the world. Or rather, to get the credit you deserve for perceptively articulating how the world ought to be changed. (That's DailyKos, Josh, the pundit squads, even that "I'm just looking to amuse" chick on all the talk shows.) If you are a diarist, you write a blog to share your intimate thoughts and personal feelings. If you are a geek, you write a blog to wax techtastic and wow your programmer cohorts. But if you are a writer, you write a blog so as to force yourself to write every day.

That advice repeated ad nauseam: write every day, write every day. That's like saying slam your head against a stone wall (on a road diverged in a yellow wood) every day, and do it again the next day. Work hurts. It usually sucks. This essay probably sucks. In fact, I'm sure of it. (Maybe all this slamming will finally knock some sense into me.)

Anyway, I've been looking into the blogosphere, studying up on pings and tags and trackbacks and permalinks. These are the digital semiotics of blogging—necessary to enter search engines, alert the blogosphere, to get heard and bookmarked and blogged about on important blogs. There is blogger etiquette; there are shared formats, accepted conventions.

And I now realize just how ill-suited this medium is to lone gunman craftspersons such as myself. Honestly, we don't want to encourage comment threads, conversations, and social networks that categorize and list everything everyone else has to say about everything.

We just want to say what we have to say and do it so well you will leave asking for more. We just want the time and space to linger over words, balance compelling ideas, tiptoe into deep water without drowning. We turn each word over like a shell found on the beach, pensively weighing whether to toss it back or slip it into our bucket. We wake up worrying about the third paragraph; we push delete then regret it and hope that "undo typing" will restore what's lost. We sift through drafts and phrases that disappear or appear like magicians' pennies, where did that metaphor behind your ear come from?

This week a newspaper editor called and asked me to make a carefully honed, methodically trimmed essay longer to fill a space, 2 more column inches. It was as much work to push 100 words back in as to birth the original 600. Maybe the piece is better, but I sure as hell can't tell. Swim in language too long and it just leaves you thrashing about, gasping for air. Finding that sweet spot where you are actively buoyant, where you can trust your body to the water, that's some trick.

Tag that "elusive streams of prose" or "voice" or just another writer, daily writing.