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Tuesday 15 October 2019

Rhymes with clog, smog, bog

What was I doing on December 1, 2011, 999 posts ago?

Wiping egg from my face.

Blogo-named Barrett Bonden, I had just announced I was closing down my 550-post blog, Works Well. The thirty-five comments I received (now, as then, a record) voiced regret, anger but mostly confusion.

In erasing WW I was punishing myself for “lack of judgment”. I’d irritated a commenter (not for the first time nor, I fear, for the last) and was vaguely depressed. When this blog, Tone Deaf, was inexplicably launched two days later the headline read: Possible Cure for Depression.

It looked like a stunt. Perhaps it was. I can’t be sure.

In switching to Tone Deaf I heaved Barrett Bonden overboard and became LdP (Lorenzo da Ponte – Mozart’s librettist). My first TD post starts: “The readers were the best thing about my previous blog. I’m proud of that.” It continues: “Mrs LdP says people liked my previous blog because it was eclectic (aka misguided, scatter-gun, indulgent). Thinks this one won’t work.”

To some extent Mrs LdP was right. TD has never achieved the same kind of rapport Works Well did. Readers fell away; blog friends died.

Still I wonder. My first “real” novel, Gorgon Times, appeared a year later. Did I discard WW to devote myself – monastically – to novels? If so I hadn’t thought things through. Novel writing is a lonely sport. Throughout most of my life I’ve done without friends. Works Well had changed this; it seemed I had friends though it’s not for me to say. Whatever, I’d hardly served them well.

Destructive acts are exhilarating but not for long. Writing fiction can be exhilarating but it’s mostly sweat and tears. Now, with age, fiction is ten times harder. Blogging, strangely, gets easier. Answers to questions, however, become more remote.

4 comments:

  1. I don't think that your readers fell away because of the change to your blog title, RR. I used to have many more commentators on my blog, but very few these days.
    I think it is due to other, more facile means of digital communication, like Instagram and Facebook. Blogs enable spacious posts, but take longer to compose and read. Most people don't seem to have the time or inclination for this in these frantic times

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  2. Avus: That would be the "received wisdom" conclusion. But whereas I acknowledge that communications technology has changed over the last five years I'm unwilling to agree that intelligent people who responded to Works Well and, to a lesser extent, Tone Deaf over the years have suddenly become unintelligent, as it were.

    Writing is and always was hard work. The way to maintain one's willingness to write is - paradoxically - to continue to write! But this brings up the matter of attititude. It is clear that most people, overtly or covertly, are bedevilled by concerns about "something to say". Thus if they do something or experience something that is outside their normal routine, a subject emerges. A visit to the dentist. A trip to London. But alas routine tends to dominate our lives, especially as we get older. How can I write about nothing? people ask themselves.

    Conveniently forgetting that many things happen within the working day that are neither tangible nor visible. We think about things and there's raw material in that.

    Or there should be. But if our mind has succumbed to forces similar to those that have suppressed our physical awareness, if we react each waking day to what we perceive as an unchanging set of circumstances, then we are at risk of entering a state where nothing does happen. Which is a terrible admission.

    But the essence of blogging is not new. As I write I'm thinking of Hazlitt, an early "blogger". Notably his essay How To Hate. Conceivably that grew out of immediate experience but - given the essay's complexity - it seems more likely it was the result of cumulative reflection. You see where I'm going.

    Some of my present-day posts do generate responses. I have spent time trying to guess why this happens. Very occasionally, I manage to re-capture that essence and there are further responses.

    I repeat, writing is hard work. If it isn't the writer should pause and reflect on one of my guiding principles: easy writing, hard reading. For many people blogging (ie, writing) is a temporary hobby; when the hard work outweighs the pleasures they find another hobby. In this they are not victims of "frantic times", but simply behaving like normal human beings.

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  3. I'm afraid that I'm not a good sample. I have gone through periods in which I blogged frequently and had a good deal of response from others, and I do agree with Avus that blogging had its little heydey a while back... But I also have passed through blog-deserts, often because of something related to bringing up children or illness or writing something else entirely that took up time. Perhaps I'm just flighty. But I tend to visit other blogs more when I'm blogging myself, though perhaps that's just the result of months in which I simply have more time.

    Certainly the more a person writes in a frequent, casual mode, the more there is to write about. It's the same with letters. I write my 90-year-old mother every day of my life, and that means that she hears about many small things, daily things, musings, walks, visits, new work of mine, etc. If I wrote her once a month, it would be a question of picking out what events or people rose about the daily, what seemed to somehow matter more. So I do think the frequent blogger or letter writer has the advantage.

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  4. Marly: I suppose I was habituated long before May 2008 which was when I launched Works Well. During two years' National Service in the RAF in 1955 - 57, I wrote very regularly to my mother (some letters have survived and I've recycled them in my blogs - waste not, want not), less so to my father (they were divorced). When I moved down to London this practice continued, then increased in frequency when I moved to the USA. Apart from National Service I've always worked as a journalist, and - ever at the back of my mind - was the thought that putting words together in sentences that obeyed the more basic rules of grammar and syntax was a useful thing to do. These days due to a more or less deliberate act of permanent hibernation the only friends I have are those in the blogosphere. By now the urge to write is no longer an urge any more than breathing is an urge. I see "Marly" in my Inbox, a template created by several years' correspondence arises, and my fingers stray towards the keyboard, sentences forming in a "Marly-appropriate" form.

    In writing posts and/or comments I am exercising my brain in a way that means almost more to me than breathing. Not to do so would cut me off from "expression" which may be the only skill I have. And here's a further point: in writing this comment for you I have raised a number of newer and deeper aspects to writing which, I hope, will float to the surface when the subject crops up again.

    I think both you and your mother profit from those daily letters. This will become even more apparent if some force majeure prevents you from doing so for a short period. Besides which there is that very special minor thrill of sending off two or three sheets of paper (rather than re-arranged electrons) in a stamped and addressed envelope. These days paper letters are so rare. At three-monthly intervals I send a paper letter to a friend dating back to the fifties; some months later he replies. A special confirmation that both of us are still alive.

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