On Writing and Blogging

I was reading Sage's post on things that go bump in the night and the eventual discovery of the Truth of all things via the scientific method (don't agree but that is for another time for Sage and I to get out our dueling foils). What really intrigued me was the comments about comments that followed that post, especially from Sage, Dim and Annoyed about the use of blogs to enhance the writing process.

I too began to blog (after Road turning me onto it - thanks sista!) to "hone my craft" and to get a little discipline and routing into my writing schedule, just like Sage. I am new to blogging so it has been an awakening of sorts, to a voice that I did not know I had, but what is it doing, if anything, to my fiction writing voice? When I write fiction for print publication, I cannot take for granted that people reading my work will be able to read my entire catalogue of writing, may know me personally, etc. so the dynamic changes.

This scares me a little bit because we are talking about two very different disciplines here and I think we have identified it as handy to the creative process as a defibrillator is to medic but ultimately, how do we use it to our best advantage? Is there a possibility that the blog is like a weed with pretty flowers that we use for extra color in the yard yet could be responsible for choking the rose garden sometime in the future? The rose garden is the actual pieces of work - that novel, that collection of poems or short fiction- that we are laboring over on trains to our money-paying jobs - sorry, I lost the meaning in the metaphor.


And there it is again! I allowed myself to put something down that isn't entirely clear, very clumsy and wouldn't even make the first public draft of a piece of fiction I am working on but I allow it because this is a blog and bloggers are family. If you guys won't forgive me clunkiness, no one will.

I do see the immediate benefits to my writing overall. I find it easier to turn the wheels on a short story I am writing, say, because of the blog-grease that is applied on an almost daily basis. I also find the writing of first person POV much easier and the creation of first person POV a snap because what is a blog if not the writing of yourself into a character. And many of us are all in character, my lovely's, that beautiful pseudonym lets us take on the mantle of so many wonderful things that the shoes of our everyday existance would never allow. Fresh Air's blog is very intriguing as she, as many of your comments indicate, seems to have no barrier, no sense of filter which makes her voice honest and daring or she has created such a complete and rich narrator which she calls Fresh Air that it is worth a pulitzer. Which ever is the truth, snaps to you girl, both are difficult to pull off.

But I am wary of the future, long term effects and I would love to hear from all you writers who have more time in the City of Blog to their credit than me. Sage, how has your fiction been affected by blogging? Dim and Annoyed, do you have a feeling to write beyond blogs now and has the added creativity brought on by blogs extended into other areas. Road, how does business writing get effected, it must in some way?

Anyway, apologies for the less than entertaining blog but I am attracted to this idea of not only blog as a creative spark plug but also as a community of people who are naturally inclined put pen to paper - well ok, not pen to paper but you get my drift.

And of course I am making the assumption, as I do with both blogging and Writing with a capital "W" that anyone is out there reading any of this anyway. I often do find myself talking to myself - I think all writers do.