Lauren Kessler is an author, narrative journalist and director of the literary nonfiction graduate program at the University of Oregon.
“My name is Lauren Kessler, and I am a blogger.”
“Hello, Lauren.”
Had anyone told me a year ago that I’d be blogging, I would have cringed. I am not a fan of blogs. I find most to be self-indulgent drivel and fervently wish that the people who spend their time writing them didn’t have quite so much time. I am sure there are important community service projects they could be doing. Volunteering at the hospital. Collecting soup can labels to fund music classes at their kid’s school. Something.
Yes, there are a few interesting political blogs, and a few interesting insider blogs, and occasionally a really smart person will start a really smart blog or an important and worthwhile idea will be blog-supported. And then there are those obviously brilliant blogs that take note of my books. But of the – gasp – approximately 113 million blogs out there, most are written by every day folks with less-than-fascinating lives about which they have less-than-noteworthy insights which they freely express in less-than-competent prose. Hooray that people are writing! Writing is good. Hooray for citizen whatever. It’s publishing the stuff I object to.
I know the internet is infinitely expandable, but just because there’s space doesn’t mean it has to be occupied, does it? Some of us out here in the west like wide open spaces. Technorati, the site that tracks and rates blogs, claims that a new blog is created every 5.8 seconds. That means that in the time it took you to read this far, seven new blogs came into existence. Wired magazine reports that 2.3 content updates are posted every second. Is there really that much to say?
The good news: Most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60 to 80 percent abandoned within one month). The “average blog,” according to one blundit (that’s a blog pundit, a word I just created) has the lifespan of a fruit fly. And, I would add, is even more annoying.
Aside from the dearth of intriguing ideas and the bold (and mistaken) assumption that anyone would be remotely interested in the details of one’s a) weight loss b) mother-in-law’s/ cat’s bad behavior c) favorite sports teams/ Sex in the City episodes/ tempeh recipes (not the same blog, I hasten to point out, although, hey, what the heck, why not?…there’s space) blogs are, by and large, poorly written. Of course, if you have nothing to say coupled with the need to say a lot of it, writing poorly comes naturally.
With some notable exceptions, most actual writers do not write blogs. That’s because writers value (and attempt to practice) good writing, and it takes time to write well, and it takes time to think through ideas so that you can write well, and ideas that merit such thought and literary attention do not often or regularly occur to the 99.99 percent of us who are non-geniuses. Yet the content-hungry blog demands new posts, if not daily then way too often. Give me content.
I used to rail against the word “content.” It’s just a slightly more sophisticated word for “stuff” – an unspecified catch-all that robs the material in question (prose, photographs, graphics, video) of any artistic, literary, intellectual or cultural merit. Now I embrace it. Content, that stuff that fills something, is exactly what most blogs are made of.
Quantity easily and almost assuredly trumps quality. That’s a fact. And professional writers can’t risk that. The writer knows that whatever is posted will always and forever be accessible to anyone: potential readers and reviewers, fans and critics, magazine and book editors who can make or break careers, conference organizers with money in their budgets for sweet speaking gigs, ex-lovers, litigators… It is a burden to produce posts that enhance – or at least don’t scuttle – your reputation as a writer, a burden to produce posts you won’t regret, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day and for the rest of your life.
In the summer of 2007 when my book, Dancing with Rose came out, powells.com asked if I would be a “Blogger of the Week.” I said yes – out of ignorance and ego, one of the more powerful combinations known to humankind. I then spent six hours a day every day for the five days of my blogging week writing my daily posts. I did nothing else that week except laundry.
Each blog had to have a theme, a worthwhile idea, and each one had to be nicely constructed, carefully written, edited and revised. Why? Because I am a writer, and it would be embarrassing if I published or allowed to be published sloppy, thoughtless work. So I wrote five 800-word self-contained essays that week. I was exhausted. How, I wondered, could regular bloggers keep up this pace? That’s when I actually started exploring the blogosphere beyond huffingtonpost and boingboing. And the answer was clear: regular bloggers keep up the pace by writing crap.
So why am I blogger? It’s an experiment. One part of the experiment is to see if I – and my husband, who is also a writer and now my co-blogger – can maintain quality of ideas and quality of prose while creating “content” several times a week. Also, it seemed to us that a blog, with its structure of serial, sequential posts, was well-suited to chronicling and tracking our family’s newest adventure, which is, in itself, an experiment. We are seeing if we can stage a revolution in our lifestyle, if we can unlearn (as Barack Obama put it recently) our “profligate ways.”
Americans are, per person, burning through twice as much energy as our western European counterparts – and almost ten times as much as the Chinese. Our family – all our families – are part of this. My family is in the process of figuring out what we have to do – what changes we have to make -- to stop being such energy hogs, to live a sane and sustainable, responsible and earth-friendly life. As we are learning how to do this, we are gathering much useful information, and it seemed to us that sharing it through a blog could be a service.
Meanwhile, it is hard work. Blogs are, as I’ve said, hungry creatures that demand to be fed. For three or four weeks – an eon in the blogosphere -- I ignored the cries of our blog, thinhouse.net as my husband took up the slack. I had a book manuscript to finish. It was Christmas. I had to wash my hair. Life got in the way. I am now out of excuses. It’s time to go create some content.
