From Books to Blogging

When I feel inspired and get to my computer early in the day, the ideas flow and I am usually rewarded with a few pages of script for my blog. I sit back after a couple of hours and read what I have written. More often than not, I’m happy with it, and rarely, unlike my early days of blogging, will I tear it up and start all over again.

But lately I’ve been feeling torn between my two major projects, one being my next book, and the other being a blog, a relatively new arrival to the world of writing.

Books have been around for a very long time, so there is no definition needed. I have very little practice in writing a novel, having completed only one. That makes me a novice, not an authority. But I can attest that the book took me more than a year from conception to completion and was a very laborious experience. Since full-length novel writing is such a long, arduous commitment, I am beginning my next book with a great deal of second-guessing and many false starts, and I sometimes wonder if it will ever get off the ground.

A blog is a different matter entirely. I can dash off a passable missive written in an informal, conversational style, attach it to my website and voila, I have successfully communicated with my audience. This style of writing is an abbreviation of the term weblog, coined by Jorn Barger on December 17, 1997. The short form, “blog”, was conceived by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase “We blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in the spring of 1999.

The blog is a boon for writers. The immediacy of the process and the benefits of having fewer reader demands makes it much easier in comparison to other more traditional methods of messaging.

I write my articles with you, my audience, in mind. I’m inspired by your responses, good or lukewarm, and always supportive. None of them are ever negative or bad. That is not to say that I never deserve a negative or bad comment from time to time. I probably do. I say this with the full admission that the blogging community is positive and supportive. Once in a very long while, a reader will offer some suggestions of a topic or slant they think I should adopt. But never have I ever received a truly negative comment. I am grateful for that.

Due to the nature of writing, it is usually practiced in isolation. That is a ‘need’, not a ‘want’. It’s impossible for most people to write when others around them are talking, when loud music is playing, or when there is any sort of activity going on. But that doesn’t mean that writers are isolates, or that they don’t like people.

Quite the contrary is true. While writers draw from their own imagination and experiences, they often need the stimulation of others and frequently obtain their inspiration from what the people around them say and do. It’s also true that face to face social interaction, phone conversations and even letter writing require a level of commitment that is difficult for a busy writer to honor.

For these reasons, the Blog is truly a blessing. It provides writers with the interaction with others that they need without the complication of face-to-face communication. They can devote whatever level of time and commitment they can manage within a blog. There are no rules or expectations to satisfy.

The world of blogging evolved informally, springing naturally out of the Internet, which was, until the early 1980s, when it became more generally used, a mysterious method of communication which was open primarily to computer experts.

Prior to this wider use, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. When a new communications protocol called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP) was established, they were able to do so.

I was at the University of Victoria at the time, taking a full load of courses, and I can remember the excitement being generated by some members of my curriculum class, who were using computers to type up their work and send it off to the professors, via the Internet. It seemed to me to be the dawn of a new era, and I was envious of their inclusion in this ‘club’, which was composed entirely of males. It seemed to be a happy accident for them, who had chosen studies in computers as opposed to the arts, in which I and many of my friends had enrolled.

But here it is, almost 40 years later, and I can look back and chuckle about it, since I and most of my female counterparts, have, in essence, “caught up”, especially in our use of Blogs.

Blogging, like other areas in communication, is now less about the technology of writing, and more about the substance. It has moved beyond the ‘how’ of writing to the ‘what’. And that, in retrospect, is exactly the way it should be.