Blogging vs. Writing

My dear friend, writer of writers, esteemed teller of tales that no one else can tell, beware! Blogging is not writing. It masquerades as such, t’is true. You sit at the desk, your fingers dance their blind and clever dance across the keyboard, words appear upon the screen, and oh, it feels like writing, like the easiest sort of writing, the writing that needs not to be justified on the morrow. It is the writing that makes the idle stupidity of the day something of worth, for has it not been written down, have not readers shared it and responded to it? Have you not been recognized, flattered and preened for today’s bon mot? Is not that what the writer lives for?
                --Robin Hobb, "Vampires of the Internet"

Once upon a time, I thought that I would tell stories for a living. I thought that I'd stir emotions with my words like an Entremetier stirs soup with a spoon. I hoped to make the small part of the world that read my words laugh more than cry and think about the world around them more than they thought about worlds between pages.

At that time, I was only sure of one thing about writers: they write. I wasn't writing. I was going to work. I was watching DVDs. I was doing all sorts of things, but I wasn't writing. Not a thing.

That's when, while visiting with friends, I first learned about blogs. That, I thought, was what I needed so I would write something, anything.

So I started one and then another. I wrote when I wanted and what I wanted. Topics and postings were erratic, but that's okay, I thought, I'm writing.

I had ideas for stories and such, but I didn't put them in my blog. I thought that if I did they wouldn't be mine anymore. Someone else would take them and distort them. I wanted them to be mine.

I quit writing on the other blog. It stopped being fun because it was one that really needed some sort of interaction. One was plenty.

But the blogging had become something other than me writing. It became a place for me to share bits with my friends and family. It stopped being about Me and started being about me. Does that make sense? Maybe it's better stated as: It stopped being about what I wanted to do and became about what I was doing. And as that change happened my desire to become a professional storyteller sort of disappeared.

My blog became closer this paragraph from "Vampires of the Internet":

Ah, my writer friend. It is harsh but it must be said. Compared to the studied seduction of the novel, blogging is literary pole dancing. Anyone can stand naked in the window of the public’s eye, anyone can twitch and writhe and emote over the package that was not delivered, the dinner that burned, the friend who forgot your birthday. That is not fiction. That is life, and we all have one. Blogging condemns us to live everyone else’s tedious day as well as our own.

But I don't think that's a bad thing.

Ms. (or Miss, whatever) Hobb obviously thinks it is.

She seems to think that to blog is to shuck all of our clothing and show our naked bodies to the world. And to be fair a lot of blogs out there are like exhibitionists, getting off by exposing private parts to the world. But what she doesn't (or didn't, when she wrote this thing) understand is that the best blogs out there are closer to a slow, seductive striptease: parts are uncovered laboriously and then partially covered when something new is revealed. The best bloggers don't just whip out the naughty/exciting bits, they entice us with glimpses and slights that may or may not be what we think we saw. They rile us up and draw us in until we're so hot we think we're going to explode, and then they slow down to cool us off a bit so that when we start to heat up again, we can get even hotter than we were before. And sometimes, the seduction does include burning dinner, but that's only a small part of the show.

Ms. Hobb end's her essay (story? rant?) with "Don't blog. Write." as if the two are mutually exclusive because in the hands of a master, blogging is a powerful form of writing.

I'm not one of the masters. (My blog isn't anything like a seductive striptease it's more like: "You wanna see my elbow, this is my elbow. Here's my freakin' knee. How about a big toe? I'll show you all of those things, but the really interesting stuff, that's not yours to see. Here's my shoulder, instead.) I came to terms with that years ago when I decided that being a professional storyteller wasn't going to happen. And yet I blog and I try to write as I blog.

I'm not here to seduce the world with my twisting narrative and clever plot twists.

I'm here to share a small part of myself with people, some I know personally, some I don't, and hope that they'll be willing to share some small part of themselves with me.