On Blogging

I finished a couple of books on writing. No they didn't help, but they were interesting. Despite blogging being to writing as sugar is to food, we can fantasize about Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prizes... being sexual Bodhisattvas, Wonder Woman, heavyweight champion, firemen and astronauts, can't we?

Reading On Writing by Stephen King I thought I was really on a roll until he asked why anyone would read a book on writing instead of spending the time writing.

Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande is a timeless book written in the 30's that describes qualities of successful writers and idiosyncracies that are impediments to writing. Given all the whining, me included, about bloggers block this is relevant here. But's let's not delude ourselves by calling it writers block.

She speaks about learning to see with the intensity of interest that a sensitive child feels of his expanding world and how we sometimes lose this ability as we become wrapped in our personal problems. The true neurotic may be engrossed in a problem so deeply buried in his being that he could not tell you what it is that he is comtemplating...the sign of this neurosis being ineffectiveness. Even the most normal among us are insulated by habit.

The dullness of apprehension to which we spinelessly submit is a danger to a writer. As long as there is a blockage in the flow of daily observations, fresh sensations and new ideas there is no alternative save salvaging material from a job or early life and rewriting endlessly of these things.

A writer is characterized as one more versatile, more sympathetic, more studious than those around him, more universal in his taste and less at the mercy of the crowd, either in his susceptibility to its influences or his cynicism and condescension towards it.

I've referred to compartmental thinking by which various perspectives can be maintained. Assuming a perspective or entering a compartment provides an observation point of sorts from which the view is uniquely different from what would be had from another. Brande refers to being multi-faceted.

How could one investing all their psychic energy in projecting an unwavering image of a hands down winner, not just winning but winning effortlessly, write evenly or believably about competition? The fear of losing that supplies the motivation to win? How could anyone who is him or herself  challenged in demonstrating sympathy, walking through life with nerve endings perpetually guarded give adequate treatment to the sensitivity of characters or even make them appear likeable? How could one investing their energy in mocking the earnestness and innocence of others maintain an emotional innocence of their own and a freshness of response that is so vital to an author's talent?

Brande handily addresses all the questions in a book I highly recommend for would-be writers, bloggers, laureates, super heroes and heroines etc. etc.

some thoughts on writing and the facades that we inevitably carry around with us which server not only as defensive barriers from others but from ourselves