SUB: Why blogging will save writing

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting 17 Jan 2010

[a rambling...]

Blogging, tweeting, social networks, all the fuss and fury of people in all kinds of walks of life busily expressing themselves -- misspelling words, turning grammar inside out, letting sentences run madly through fields of commas, outstripping punctuation, and what they are using for topics, characters, settings, and so forth? Mama mia, it's a mess!

But.

Having read your brother's ramblings. Having scratched your head about that tweet from a friend that lacked a hint of the context. And used funny spelling -- UR2? LOL? Having read all the complaints and gripes about something that turns out to have been a misunderstanding to start with. Having endured all of that, you might just be ready to enjoy a well-written short story, novel, or even poetry.

I'm suspicious that when we say that only professionals, experts, those who are inspired by some strange muse above and beyond the normal drivel -- only those people should be allowed to practice writing, we are also likely to be restricting reading. And without reading, well, writing is a bit like painting in the dark, it may be somewhat engaging for the artist, but it's not particularly interesting for the audience.

On the other hand, when people are busily engaged in writing and reading as amateurs, that's when they really appreciate the well turned phrase, characterization, observation that makes settings come to life, and all the rest of the panoply of writerly tools.

It's the other side of the 90% rule -- to get a lot of good stuff, you've got to do a lot of wading through the other kind of stuff. But then you really appreciate the good stuff you find, or sometimes even come up with yourself. And if only a few people -- the professionals -- are writing, the amount of good stuff is limited. And if there isn't enough, you may lose critical mass, drop below the point that supports mass publication. So we really want lots of people to be reading, which means lots of people writing -- even if great bales of it are everyday trivia, with all of the confusion and misunderstanding and misspelling and misstatement and other mistakes that are likely to crop up.

Trying to sketch, dabbling with watercolors and oils and pastels, learning a little bit about perspective and masses and all that artistic stuff -- it makes me really appreciate what the artists are doing. It certainly doesn't make me a great artist, but it gives me a better understanding of what's going on, of what they are trying to do.

In the same way, the spreading culture of writing and reading that goes with blogging, tweeting, social networks, and all the rest of the digital froth helps ensure that there are lots of people who read, who have tried to tell a little story and appreciate that it's hard.

Will blogs kill writing? No way. Sure, the pile of 90% is getting bigger and bigger, but that also means that if you dig a little bit, you can find some saltpeter, to let you make gunpowder. And that leads to fireworks! Or maybe even a diamond in the rough?

If you want to kill writing, restrict it to a few specialists. Make it something that only the high priests and critics are allowed to practice. That would choke off the practice of reading and writing pretty fast.

But if you want to encourage it, let the blogs run rampant, the tweeters twit, and the social networks lace everything together. Then figure out how to find and reward the 10%. That's the hard part right now.

I think there's a lot more to say, but I've rambled enough for now. So... what do you think? Are you ready for reading and writing to become a popular sport?

Write!