Why I Blog, And Why I Can’t Not Blog
Sprague over at Diary of a Rat challenged me recently to write about why I blog.
A quick aside: am I the only person who doesn’t particularly like using the word blog as a verb (even though I just did above)? In other words, saying that I “write a blog about online media and online media cult-ery” sounds much more pleasing to me than “I blog about online media.”
In any event, after reading Sprague’s great piece about why he blogs/writes, it was fortunate timing that I also read a piece by Jason at Webomatica relating “reasons why I nearly quit blogging.”
This led me to think about why we choose to do things on an ongoing basis, whether it be going to work or cleaning up the dishes, and so on. The benefits of the activity (paying the rent, having a clean kitchen) must outweigh the results of not doing it (getting evicted, kitchen’s a toxic wasteland). Taking it one step further, in order to excel in anything in life, whether it be sailing or chess or breakdancing or blogging, you have to be passionate about it. And not only do you have to be passionate about it, but the really critical factor for success is that you have some level of compulsion that prevents you from not doing it.
It’s this compulsion, I’ll wager, that drives you to keep hammering away when all normal rationale tells you to do other human activities, such as eating, sleeping, or talking in normal fashion with other humans. It gives you that motivation, deep in the night, when you’re sleep deprived and you know you have to get up for work in four hours and thirty three minutes, that gives you that extra bizarre push to bang out a couple of meager words to send into the digital void.
Of course, others may argue vehemently against some or all of this, but this begins to set the stage for why I write, and these days that mostly means publishing this here Online Media Cultist blog. I’ve always felt that tension between writing and not writing, and for me the benefits of writing outweigh — most of the time! – the pluses of not (more TV and reading time, sleeping, eating Cheetos, etc.).
For a while I thought I was “supposed” to be a novelist, but really blogging suits me best. Probably the most important difference is that I can have an idea or whim or notion, whip some words together, hope to parse them into some coherent order, and shuffle it all online where – and this is the part that continues to amaze and mystify and delight me – anyone on the planet with an Internet connection has at least some infinitesimal chance of checking it out.
And joining the conversation. That’s best part number two. I get to kick things off, and then other people “out there” get to check in with what they’re thinking. This back-and-forth conversating often heads offline and in my case has led to some great connections and even friendships. Communities based upon shared passions and ideas is an incredible benefit of the Internet age, and the coolest part of all is that the whole shebang is just getting started.
So getting to be a part of such a community is a “selfish” benefit. And there are others as well. Sprague relates that “blogs can be great big business cards,” which is absolutely true. Online Media Cultist in many ways is a diary of what’s on my mind in terms of the industry I love and toil away in.
But cutting past all of the philosophical and intellectual rationale, writing and blogging is fun. So that’s the simple answer!
Recent Entries
- Are social news sites like Digg useful anymore?
- Could Google Friend Connect be a MySpace killer?
- How will Twitter ever make money?
- Google Earth comes to life-like
- Grand Theft Auto IV goes very very old school
- Gadgets threaten the Internet’s future? Ridiculous
- The online video monetization equation (or, how do you make money on this stuff?)
- Using smart content aggregation and smart people networks to beat back the over coverage plague
- Creative destruction and the online video gold rush
- What’s in a game? (Or, how Grand Theft Auto IV reminded me yet again that everything’s changing quick-like)
April 30th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Hmmm, I’m beginning to think all the bloggers in the world whose blogging is connected to novel writing in some way should unite and… um, take over the world? I got nothing.
I started blogging because I needed the discipline of catering to an audience. And I keep blogging because people will occasionally say nice things about my writing and I love compliments. So I guess ‘narcissism’ is my simple answer!
April 30th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Excellent.
You are on to something important when you write about not being able not to — I wrote a review of Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert at Harvard in which he says that we are wired in a way that makes it easier to recover from disappointment at trying something and failing, versus the regret that comes from not doing what we know we should.
The mention of novel writing also resonates. I’ve been working on a collection of short stories for years and every time I consider adding to the blog I glance over at it. The quick fix of blogging versus the delayed gratification of long-form writing… a constant struggle.
April 30th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
So many reasons, so many posts to write so little time - yeah, good observations. It’s interesting to read that you once considered writing a novel, which is something I’ve never considered.
Maybe a group of bloggers could write one page each, and then at the end of the year, there’s the novel!
April 30th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
Amrita, I think that blogging is a fabulous place to get serious about publishing in general, which is exactly what happened for me. It allowed me to find my own strengths (and weaknesses!) as a writer. After a while I began to realize that my passion and energy and voice were all much stronger in the “non-fiction” world of blogging than in writing fiction. I love fiction and I love stories and would love to get back to novel writing at some point in the future, but blogging for now and for the foreseeable future is where it’s at for me.
April 30th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
I should add too that finding Blogcritics was a very important step in my development as a writer/blogger!
April 30th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Sprague, thanks and very interesting! All I know is that I’m pretty lazy about almost everything in my life EXCEPT things I care deeply about, for which I devote about 212% of my life and soul. That energy and drive helps me to get over natural fears in many cases and absolutely demands that I keep moving on to the Next Thing!
Have you thought about blogging (there’s that word again!) *about* your short story writing? Perhaps one can kickstart the other?
April 30th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Jason/Webomatica, great idea, love it! I used to sit around with my friends as a kid, creating collective made up stories from strings of words. One person would write a sentence, then the next would go, and so on.
I’ve actually completed a draft of a novel after several bungled earlier attempts. Finishing it (kind of a fictionalized comic version of my senior year at college) and realizing the many miles I needed to go to turn it into a polished final product (and likely MAJOR rewrites it needed) helped me to reinvent the idea that I could be a capital W Writer without being a Novelist
April 30th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
I hate being called a blogger. I do not refer to my site as a blog, it is my website where I write reviews and coluumns and articles.
but that’s just me. and yes Blogcritics did play a big role in my continuing desire to write at such a prolific rate.
May 1st, 2007 at 9:41 pm
Chris, I used to be more militant about it like you, but I’ve softened some over the last few years. I kind of like using the term writer/blogger, actually!
May 3rd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Eric, interesting comment about writing a novel. I’m trying to do both and I’d much prefer to see the novel published, although it’s a lot harder than blogging. Hell, writing it is easy compared to getting an agent, a publisher, and all the rest.
I keep saying I’m going to dump both my blogs…but I can’t bring myself to do it. I think there’s either something in the water or some cosmic ray that makes us addicted to our blogs. (That plus how easy it is compared to every other form of writing.)
Good stuff!