Why blog?

When there is so much to do, why add another thing? Especially when so many others do it so well.

The same can be said, I suppose, of anything. Why write? Why bother when the likes of Lydia Davis and Amie Bender and Amy Hempel are out there. When Haruki Murakami can slam out a novel, then a book of short stories, then another novel, then another book of short stories… why bother?

Why indeed.

Blogging rewards brevity and immediacy: No endless revising, no hours spent inside a noun clause.

Blogging requires a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap: Put it on the page, link it to something that might be related, put myself out there, be unfinished because it is okay. A blog is a conversation rather than a production.

Okay, I’m learning about blogging, I’m convincing myself to go for it. But as primarily a fiction writer, it is difficult to write in a medium where I end up writing about myself, because I am a relatively fixed point in this constant interaction with the ideas and facts of the exterior world, and because the medium of the blog tends to be a personal one. I could blog from different me/characters in a schizophrenic-kind of way, which might be interesting to draw from, to evolve into. I could role-play characters to create a living novel or some such, but then my blogging wouldn’t be any different than fiction except that a first draft would be published immediately–perish that thought.

I think I’ll stick with me. Blogging. Writing Out Loud. Free-form. Not thinking too hard before writing.

And there is my obligatory new blog introspective.

An intelligent article on blogging by Andrew Sullivan, an Atlantic senior editor, from which I have drawn many of my ideas about blogging.