Dear Reader: A writer friend recently asked, “What are the benefits of having a blog?” One could turn the question around and answer, “One of the benefits of having a writer friend who asks about blogs is that it may prompt the production of a blog post.” Read on.
When I was young, I did not know what “blog” meant. It didn’t mean anything, yet. Nobody knew what a blog was, because the word hadn’t been invented. The thing hadn’t been invented.
Aw, shucks—computers were giant machines in huge buildings, fed and monitored by teams of scientists in white lab coats. They were used only for Big Problems, like calculating the complete value of π as it will be revealed on the Day of Judgment.
I did know I wanted to be a writer, but that’s as far as it went: wanting to. It may strike you as crazy, Dear Reader, but I had not the slightest idea how to be a writer.
As far as I knew, you would shut yourself up in a room with a typewriter and a ream of paper, and SHAZAM!, something would strike you, and you would write it down, mail it off to Bennett Cerf, and get a million dollars.
Well, it worked for Melville and Hemingway and Louisa May Alcott—why not for me? Never mind that Melville could barely support his family, Hemingway killed himself, and Alcott wrote girly stories: the point was, you had to do your writing all alone, and it was a divine gift, not something that could be learned.
I now believe that writers do NOT produce great works in isolation. Homer’s epics were no doubt recited over and over, to many different audiences, giving him an idea what worked and what didn’t. Shakespeare’s plays, like all plays, were molded line by line as actors spoke those lines and played the parts. The great American pantheon of writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Longellow, Holmes, and the rest—all knew one another, read one another’s work, and functioned as a little New England-based Algonquin Roundtable.
I’ll bet even J.D. Salinger learned something from somebody. He was just too much of a jerk to admit it.
When I finally began aspiring to be a writer seriously, after retirement from other gigs, I knew that I needed to seek out those who could teach me. They included actual writing teachers like Christine DeSmet and Laurie Scheer, but they also included a great many fellow writers. Comrades in arms; sufferers from the writing disease. People who, like me, spent their time down in the trenches of storytelling—looking for ways to make our efforts stand out and attract readers.
I learned that writers like to form little clubs—groups for mutual critique and support. In one of the writers’ groups I joined, Tuesdays With Story, blogs came up in conversation. By this time, blogs had become a thing.
“Blog” is a shortened form of “web log.” But that derivation hardly suggests what they really are. A blog is what happens when somebody gets an address on the internet and starts posting short or extended statements of his or her point of view.
Blogs may be very specific, devoted to one craft, hobby, or special interest. But on the whole, they tend to range a bit wider. A blog can be a window into a writer’s soul.
It was rumored in our group that if one was writing novels and wanted to get them published and read, it was essential to have a “platform”—a basis for public recognition of one’s work. And a blog was a great way to build a platform.
But, Fair Reader, please be advised Your New Favorite Writer did not just fall off a turnip truck. Oh, no. It was immediately apparent that a blog, if it was to be any good, would be just as much work as any other form of writing. If I wanted to have a blog and have that blog represent my work fairly to the world, I would have to put as much time and effort into it as into my novels and short stories. And what would be the point of that?
“Well,” said my friend Jerry Peterson, then the convener of the Tuesday night group, “you might think of a blog as not just a way to promote your work. It might be your work—or at least a significant part of it. After all, you can write whatever you want, and as owner of the web address, you are in a position to present it to the world, without an intervening gatekeeper.”
Oh.
That.
Jerry was suggesting that a blog is essentially a form of self-publishing. In those days, only a few short years ago, self-publishing was not as respected as it is today. Still, it was a way to get my work in front of people. People who might like what I’m doing and hunger for more. Books, for example.
I could see where this was going. I resolved to plunge in, give it a try. That was over six years ago. What you are reading now is the 317th installment of this blog, titled “Reflections.”
BUT WHY THIS BLOG?
Why this, particular, blog?
When I started writing it, I did not know what I was doing. But people whose views I respected said, “Your blog should have a theme, a brand. It should be identifiable as something. You should have some idea what you’re trying to do with it.”
Well, it was to be a means of presenting my writing to the public. Well, that was all to the good. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had something to present to the public. I wasn’t qite sure what, but I was on the trail.
Did I mention, Gentle Reader, that there was a gap of sixty years or so between when I first knew I wanted to be a writer and when I actually started learning how?
I now recognize that long hiatus as being merely the most obvious symptom of the fact that, when I started out, I didn’t have anything to say. But as we age, we acquire experience and even, we hope, wisdom.
Now, I do have something to say. It’s just hard to figure out what it is, and how to say it. But not impossible. And the figuring out is best done by actually writing. Somebody said you have to write a million or so words of bad writing before it starts coming out good. So I’m working on that.
I’ve got something to say. I can say it in writing. It’s just hard.
By the time I launched this blog, I had already figured out that everything I have to say comes out of my deep attachment to the past—my commitment to re-experience the past, to plumb its depths, and to refashion historical knowledge into historical fiction: writing that says, “within an understandable historical context, here is what life may be, at its best or at its worst, but definitely life as best apprehended in the living of it.”
If this is what my writing is about, it’s what my blog should address. I knew that, with a weekly deadline, I would wind up rambling a bit and imprinting my own personal take on what it means to dig into the past and relate it to the present. So I decided to call this blog “Reflections”—a very general kind of label—but to further qualify that with the catch-phrase “seeking fresh meanings in our common past.”
That’s what Your New Favorite Writer has been trying to do every week since then.
What has surprised me is how ccreativity is like a well. In a good water well, you may have to prime the pump, but once you do, it brings up fresh stuff. The well never runs dry. Almost every Tuesday for the last six years I’ve found something to write about, to the tune of a thousand words or so.
Sometimes I miss Tuesday and post a day late (like this week!). Once in a while I have not had time to do a new post and so have re-run an old one. But not very often. It’s just a matter of tweaking my brain a bit, and out it comes.
Some posts are more consequential than others. Some more literary, some more wry, some more snarky. But all have to do, in one way or another, with the passage of time and what that means in the living of life.
They are not full novels, like The Price of Passage or Izzy Strikes Gold!, but they’re well-meant installments in a writer’s quotidian encounter with the stuff inside and the stuff outside. I hope you find some merit in the reading.
Until next time,
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
.jpg){kind=link}