On Blogging

I started a writing class last night, right here at Lighthouse (Hooray!).
My first assignment was to write about a particular writing challenge. As i chose blogging, I figured I would share it here. I'm hoping that the free writes in my class may generate good content for this blog moving forward; I guess we'll asll just have to wait and see!

When I was pregnant with my first child, I began a memoir class at Gotham Writers Workshop, fearful that once the baby came, I would never write again. I approached the class with the abandon of someone writing from the freedom of their death bed, where there is little left to lose: in workshop, I remember another writer commenting, “whoa, she's really going for it here.” I'll let your imagination run wild about the scene in question, but I will tell you this: there did seem to be an urgency to tell my most lurid stories, to get the sex and drunken exploits out into the universe now, as if talking about these behaviors did not become a new mother.

In a way, I was wrong about all of this. Giving birth to a child and mothering an infant inures you to the effect of bodily functions, awakens you to the miracles our bodies can perform and, for me at least, created the desire to run towards the truth, rather than away from it. I also wrote more, not less. I started this blog when Clio was ten months old, as a way to centralize photos and updates, but I quickly recognized the blog as a platform, and remembered, with surprise and relief, that I was a writer. Gradually, I made room among the cute photos and milestones for commentary and mini-essays, and I took pleasure experimenting with form. I felt satisfied that I was producing, the creative urge sated, the desire for readers met by the occasional comment, on the blog or in person, of “great post!”

Three years and nearly 600 posts later, I have begun to worry that blogging has spoiled me for the more sustained work of essays. While blogging allows the author to tell her daily truths, the immediacy of the form can sometimes obscure the bigger picture, and an audience filled with friends and family members can mean an editorial slant towards the sunnier side of life.

On the craft front, I recognize that blogging is satisfying in part because it plays to my strengths as a writer, and because it is fun, slipping around the hard work that comes in polishing a piece, reworking it until it, well, works. I have always had the greatest talent on a sentence level: they come out lovely, fully formed, big bodied. My sentences sound good and evoke a feeling, but they are also plagued by bad habits that are easy to forgive on a first reading, like the three descriptive phrases I just used to describe my own sentences. I understand that's at least one too many. In blogs, there is only a first reading, except for the blogger's mother, who will read posts repeatedly and forgive them each time (thank you to my number one fan!). Sentences that swoon seem like a good thing. There is little revision. Posts are snapshots, captured moments. Sometimes, there is not even spell-check. There is an impermanence that is forgiving.

When your sentences come out well, one after another, you wind up with a bigger problem: a whole essay that flows smoothly enough that taking it apart for piddling concerns like logic, perspective, and theme can become painful. There is a fear that touching the words will tarnish them, and I have rarely had the courage to break a work apart, even when I recognize the need; I fear that like Humpty Dumpty, no amount of soldiers and men can put it back together again. This is the joy--and the pain--of blogging: each piece is its own universe, even if it is incomplete.