Hi, Matt. Saw your post via Philly Future. Blogging, for me, is more a means of communicating with my friends, who are scattered throughout the country, and if random strangers pass by, eavesdrop, and perhaps comment, that’s fine too.

I don’t have as much motivation to do writing as a career as I used to, but I find that my “real” writing (i.e., for papers and other publications) has degraded somewhat because of my blog writing– I tend to meander around subjects and write more extemporaneously than be more methodical.

Thanks for responding, Yoko–I like your site a lot.

I, too, write differently for my blog than I would for another publication. I think that my original post was a little reductive–there are so many types of blogs out there; some are completely informal and personal, while others aspire to magazine-type pieces. I didn’t mean to say that every blogger is a would-be journalist, but I do think that many bloggers would gladly write for a living if they could get paid for it.

I recently corresponded with a writer at Salon, who told me that if I wanted to write professionally, I should seek out any source available, including blogs, to publish my work. He suggested trying to write for the blog as if I were writing for the types of publications in which I hope to place my stuff.

After I got that advice, I found it very hard to write—-my natural urge to write informal blog posts conflicted with the feeling that I should write longer, more involved magazine-type pieces. Since I want to keep this nascent blog going, I’ve resigned myself to writing mostly informal things, with (hopefully) a few more carefully written posts mixed in that I will eventually be able to use as clips.

It will be interesting to see how print journalism changes in response to blogs. So far, it looks like many magazines and online journals have added blogs to their sites, but I haven’t seen a widescale change in the tone of the print publications themselves. Then again, it’s probably too soon to tell…

Blogging for me is a personal pursuit and part of my political activism. I had a personal blog for a few years and gave it up for lack of interest. Now I try to focus my writing on things political, because that’s where my interest lies now. Maybe latter I’ll blog about knitting or family life or television, who knows? I suppose some would call it a hobby, but hobbys tend to be more solitary and not forms of communication. I used to have delusions about being a professional writer, but now I just enjoy writing for writing’s sake.

Nicole, do you mean lack of interest on your part or on others? I think that it’s very hard to write a purely personal blog…it’s like memoir-writing, only off-the-cuff and public.

This blog began as part of my political activism, too–like so many others, the election left me reeling, and finding an outlet for those feelings helped me deal with what happened.

Incidentally, I stopped writing for my movie review website, The Book-Lover’s Guide to Cinema (http://www.guidetocinema.com) a few years ago, because the format seeemed too constrained. Like you, I wanted to be able to write about anything–books, politics, sports. Blogging entered my world at just the right time…

I try to use my blog as an online journal, a sort of rough draft for memoirs, essays and observations. I don’t know if they will be published — more likely “no” than “yes,” though I do write things that I think could possibly be published in some form some day — but I do think that writing essays can only help me with my writing, both in my current job and down the road. (Your mileage may vary.) I am positive, though, that my work on my short-lived Eagles blog in 2003 really helped me with a story I did for the Philadelphia Daily News that summer, at least in terms of keeping me up-to-date with knowing what the Eagles were doing.

I guess I have a dream that one day the best of my blog will be collected into some sort of essay collection, or it’ll land me a great-paying magazine job, but that’s probably more fantasy than anything else. So I still put up meandering, meaningless self-indulgent stuff on my blog — it’s an exercise in writing, and although my essay about why I miss Center City as a place of wonder might not be very good (it’s not), I might take something from it some day and turn it into a publishable work. Who knows.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with mixing the informal stuff, as you say, in with longer, clip-quality work. (And I just came here from Philly Future, so I haven’t read anything but this post, but I will after I finish this comment.) I try and sort of do the same thing, though I’m tending to write longer pieces nowadays, I suppose. (I also do this “5×5″ thing where I write five paragraphs of five sentences each. I don’t know if they’re any good, but it’s a fun writing exercise to do.)

I hope this helped, or answered your question, or was at least a good read. If you have any feedback about my writing (which I always appreciate), my e-mail is on the site.

Side note: I am still struggling with that last part of Will Carroll’s post, that dealing with criticism thing, even though I wrote hundreds of articles for my college paper (and was a columnist for a semester!) and got lots of criticism, warranted and unwarranted. When I am published, I have an editor to (hopefully) filter out anything dumb I might say. On my blog, it’s just me. I feel like I’m overly worried about offending somebody or doing something stupid on my blog. Hell, I even read over this comment five times.

I blog as a substitute for the kind of frustrated activism that previously had me sending pained emails (or occasional more uplifting ones) to groups of anywhere from 5-25 friends at a ttime — “Can you believe this?” or “Take action now!” etc. The actual blogging is more than that, as I am stimulated to write something as introduction to pull-quotes or links, or to explore a topic more seriously when several stories come together in some pattern in my awareness. There’s also an aesthetic component to it that is absent from the quick emails — both an aesthetic of the writing and the possibilities of sometimes adding an image as a comment on or expansion of a post.

But no, blogging for me is neither a means to a writing career nor simply an end in itself (although the latter is closer) — it’s a means of making people think, of spreading information and my point of view, perhaps having some influence, even if on a small group of people. Thus I would probably stop if literally *nobody* came by, but I don’t need an audience of thousands to make me think I’m doing something worthwhile…

Thanks, D-Mac and acm, for visiting the site and commenting.

D-Mac, “Ennui” is a great category name. It’s also apt, considering the posts you have there. Hang in there–the period just after graduation is tough. Things will get better with time, believe me.

acm, thanks for your post, and for the correction to my question. I feel kind of cheap now, whoring for big media attention on my little blog ;)

As for why I stopped my personal blog of a few years back: because I was bored with it. When I started it I really didn’t have a life, so it was a way to feel connected in the world and communicate with it (although I’m not sure anyone even knew). But it was cheap therapy. I know some friends read it, but it wasn’t about them. It was totally about me.

Now, I blog because it feels good and it exercises my thinking and writing skills. I like the coversational, off the cuff tone and language of most blogs. It may be the death of writing, as some claim, but it is true communication.

More whys, just personal
I posted the following as a comment over here during my 10-minute lunch break the other day, and I thought it was good, so I figured I’d repost it here. Just a little insight into why I think I’m doing this website, which is always something I’m try…

a week–and many posts–later, and already this post seems dated. The best thing about it is ACM’s distillation of what it means to be a blogger, a label I now wear proudly.

A good topic Matt…

I write blogs for fun; they are quite enjoyable in the sense of simply airing my mind in print.

As for the above comments regarding bloggers as would-be, or wanna-be writers, well if the average person knew how lonely it is being a writer, I am sure they would be glad to keep their day job.

Serious writers are a special breed, they first have a love of words, and then a love for writing.

greg

http://gregorywest.blogspot.com