Why Write a Blog?
That’s a damn good question. First, let me say that I don’t know how often I’ll post a piece. Whenever I feel like I have time to write and have something to say. I could post a few within a week or two. And I’m sure there will be times where weeks or months pass without a post. Now, why am I doing this? Who cares what I have to say? I would venture to guess not many. This is certainly not something I always wanted to do. The quick answer is writing a blog is a way to help draw people into reading my work. You can reach people on a personal level, so that they will want to follow what’s going on in your writing world, become interested in your perspectives. In short, they will want to buy your books. Fine. Sure. Okay, it’s a business, and the business is selling books. Thanks for reading this, see you next post. However, there must be more motivation for me to sit down and write ideas than the purpose of doing something to help sell copies of my books. Yes, Col. Parker would laugh and say, “You’re a naive fool.”
I’ll fall back on the idea I always told my students, “You write to learn what you think.” Yes, one needs to learn basic writing skills to convey one’s thoughts effectively and clearly on paper (or screen). Yet, when you take ideas from your head and convey them in the written form you use a different mental process than the process of just thinking about the ideas. Processing ideas into language so that other human beings can understand your thoughts makes you think longer and deeper about your ideas, which in turn gives you a better understanding about your thoughts. For many fiction writers, including me, we don’t know what the story is about until we write the story. We write a creative draft or a blind draft. I know many writers who plot out the story and have an ending before they begin the story. That works for them. Many of these writers say, “How can I write a story if I don’t know where it’s going?” Fair enough. Good for you. Similarly, most people should create an outline before they write an essay so that they will not waste their time fumbling around trying to organize their thoughts on paper. I remember a master class taught by the writer Julianna Baggott that touched on this very point. She stated she had to plot out a story or novel before she sat down to write it, but she admitted that she was also open to digressions and sudden subplots, opportunities for new avenues in the story. One way to look at it is that you are building a road to follow for the story, but you are not paving it yet. It’s always under construction.
This mental process is connected to the pull of curiosity, the desire to learn what you and others think. Part of the enjoyment of teaching Freshman Comp for 30 years and Fiction Workshop for 25 years was reading the thoughts of other human beings. I’ll admit that evaluating hundreds of pages of essays and stories in a sitting would wear me down. Nevertheless, I always found the written thoughts of other human beings very interesting. True, some of these thoughts were much more interesting than others. And I’m sure that the written thoughts were much more interesting the first five years of teaching than the written thoughts of students from the last five years of my teaching career. Are you still with me? Are you asking, “Where are you going with this?” The point, I think, is that writing these thoughts will be interesting for me, that I’ll clarify some ideas for myself. I’ll learn some things. Hopefully. Maybe a couple of people will find these thoughts interesting, thus will want to buy my books and read my fiction. Good. Maybe a few sales will convince a publisher to publish my next novel. Even better. This reminds me of a question a workshop student asked me a few years ago, “Why would someone want to read a story I’ve written?” That’s not the question you should ask yourself. It’s just not answerable. Art is too subjective for such an idea. Some people will find what you write interesting and intriguing, but others will find it boring and dreadful. The question one should ask is why are you sitting down to write the story? If you don’t find it interesting, then no one else will.
