This blog has come up in conversation a bit lately, mostly in the form of whinging that I'm not updating much and that the posts have gotten mostly personal (true and true). Aside from the usual complaints, two other things come up- one, the general opinion is that its pretty well written, or "put together". And two, that I must spend a lot of time getting it to read that way.
Without any false modesty both opinions kind of surprised me, because I don't put much time into writing these entries at all. In fact, the whole appeal of starting the blog in the first place, and what's kept me going with it, is the complete lack of pressure to put effort into it. I've written for money under pressure before, and it doesn't make for a good hobby. Its certainly not something you can do un-selfconsciously in a half hour on a Wednesday night between other things. When you read Time Magazine or Slate, you can almost feel the writers agonizing over their little descriptions and turns of phrases. It takes enormously more time and personal pressure to write that way, but unless you happen to be William Faulkner or something, that sort of careful, self-conscious style actually doesn't do much to improve the writing. Exceptions can be made for true masters of course, but those people are few and far between. On the whole, as I get older I find I enjoy "proper Writing' less and less.
Thereau (sp?) said, "use whatever words you like, all you can say is who you are". True, so you might as well just cut the act and not let anything get in the way. I like blogging because it breaks down all the stiff, awkward little formalities that usually kill non-professional writing. Everyone has a story to tell, and at one point or another we all tell them. But when we go to write it down, we suddenly assume that what we want to say, using the tawdry words we use everyday, can't possibly be good enough. We have to go through with this little routine of dressing up what we have to say in little costumes it would normally never wear. And then when it sounds ridiculous as a result, we blame our ability to write, rather than our failure to just say what we're thinking as we normally sound. Blogs have given a venue for people of different walks of life to just tell their stories, without having to worry about anything but that.
Have blogs produced good writing? I think they have, though the type of writing that comes out of them is markedly different from what's normally considered good writing. Lots of italicized points, boldfaced fonts, and cutaways to quick, simulated dialogue. Long rambling pieces and others that can screech to a halt. Here are some examples of what I think is really good blog writing. These examples bump and jag along in ways that editors work their hardest to flatten out and tame, and none would have stood a prayer of getting into a conventional magazine in their current forms. But I think they're really well written, and rank as some of the best stuff I've read over the past year.
Pride and Palpitations, by LowerManhattanite, a black man watching TV in amazement as Obama speaks after winning the Iowa caucus. This guy is a phenomenal writer. I'm put to shame just thinking about how good he is.
Farm Fetish John Rogers gets really sick of hearing about what heartland America thinks.
From Start-up to Bust-up A survivor of the dot.com boom explains how venture capitalists ruined a perfectly profitable start-up (long).
I wrote Donkey Kong A former Atari programmer explains how he ported one of the day's most popular games to the system. A good read even if you don't know or care about programming.
As a contrast- The author of that last piece is actually an avid reader, and seemed embarrassed that the above post attracted so much attention. He stalled on writing more about Atari, because he said he didn't just want to dash off a factual account, and wanted to instead write about it properly. The end result was this, which for all the effort in my opinion just isn't as interesting to read.
