Reflections on a Year of Blogging

BookFox has nearly reached the ripe old age of One year, and, as I look back on my year of blogging, I find it interesting how this form of writing has affected my other writing. In addition to blogging, I am a short story writer. When it’s all added up, I have written fewer fiction stories than in previous years, but not that many fewer. I find it far easier to surf the web for articles to link to or speculate on the latest novel than to buckle down and attempt to create a world (whether that says something about my skills as a fiction writer is something I’m going to ignore). This slight decrease, I believe, is something to be expected – any form of writing tends to drain the writer from the energy to tackle a different form of writing. Many of my friends are journalists or technical writers or work for advertising agencies, and all of them find it difficult to write for themselves (creatively) after eight hours of writing for others. But it’s also a sacrifice that the writer has to be able to make – and it’s done in the belief that diversifying the genres of your writing, is, in the long run, fruitful for creating a full set of well-rounded skills.

It’s actually my journal writing that blogging has affected most. I have maintained a journal for more than a decade now, and my efforts occupy most of a row on my bookshelves – most are black, and bound, but a few have spiral loops and green covers. They are journals – not diaries – so they don’t chronicle the day, they contain thoughts, story ideas, reflections, travel narratives, and any number of miscellaneous tidbits thrown in because they linger in my mind. As I look through my journal this last year, I’ve written virtually nothing in it, and I ascribe that mostly to concentrating on the blog. While I used to stack up lists of topics that I wanted to reflect upon in a personal, private manner, now I number sticky notes near the computer that remind me of my next newsworthy post. Even though my blog is not even a daily blog, like some of the superstar literary bloggers, it still occupies a solid chunk of my mind: much of my time is spent thinking about what I’ll write about next. And so I’ve stopped journaling.

I don’t mean in any way to diminish the act of blogging; in fact, I’ve loved it. I love the community. I love learning so much from my fellow bloggers (and from those who leave messages on my site). I love all the furious, rip-roaring literary throw-downs and rambunctious new titles that get everyone up in a tizzy. But I do want to highlight the cultural shift blogging is starting to create. Bloggers – and now I’m not talking about “professional” ones but also the “look what my kid did last week” blogs – have to prize the public over the personal. It’s a focus on revelation, on disclosure, to a broad audience, which allows for wider dissemination of knowledge, but also creates less time for introspection. It’s the introspection that I feel I’ve lost. I’ve stopped writing things that dig at why I do the things I do, that examine my psychological state of mind, or the course that my life is taking (which too often is hijacked by peripheral concerns).

For instance, today I would have journaled. I would have journaled that I saw an old woman fall. She split her head open on the edge of the sidewalk and started wailing. I called 911. She spurted streams of blood onto the cement; one hand pressed against her forehead, the other one cupped a pool of blood as if she could save it and put it back inside. She was Korean and we talked at each other without understanding. I touched her ankle to try to communicate that I was calling for help. When she got up and started walking, I tried to keep her still, but she wouldn’t be stopped. She wandered in to the manager. When the ambulance came, I flagged them down and led them through the building. The paramedics were taken aback at the deepness of the gash, and decided to immobolize her neck on a flat board. Afterwards I regretted not trying to staunch the blood with my shirt. I had panicked, I admit. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I thought: get professionals. When I should have taken off my shirt and tried to stop the profuse bleeding. I checked my jacket, pants, shirt, for blood splatters, but couldn’t find any. Later, after teaching my USC class, my pen exploded in my bag at the gym. It soaked everything in a rich dark ink. My hands were covered. My books were smeared. It wouldn’t wash off. I was more upset than I should have been, and then I realized why. I thought coincidental metaphors only came in books, but from reading Murakami I should have known better.

But instead of journaling, I suppose I just blogged about it. Just the act of blogging, though, the sending out to the world, affects the content I put up. If I had written this in my journal, it would have been different. It would have been longer, probably. It would have been more thoughtful. It would have had a messier scrawl and been written mostly in shorthand (okay, the last one isn’t much of an improvement). And I never post personal stuff like this, so most of the time, if I don’t journal about it, it gets lost in the ephemera of daily events.

After reading this post over, it seems to be a goodbye letter to the blogosphere. Sorry to disappoint expectations, but no. I’m not quitting. I’m just going to try to do a better job balancing all three of my writing responsibilities (and probably throw in a fourth, with various freelancing responsibilities, but whatever). Most importantly, I don’t want to let my public communication, with my fiction and blogging, eclipse my private ponderings. To be a well-rounded individual, as well as a well-rounded writer, I want to find time for all of them. To see whether that will actually happen, you’ll probably have to wait until the second year anniversary of BookFox.