Untitled.
I was recently clicking around, reading random blogs. Then the blogs of people that comment on those blogs, seeing where it would take me. I open new tabs in Foxfire for each of the comment-ers to follow up on one by one.
I stumbled on a blog of an actual writer. Not just a blog writer, which everyone is. A real, honest-to-goodness, published on paper, writer.
I thought, great, this should be interesting. What I discovered is, no....it is not.
Writers write about writing.
Think about that for a second.
I can't even think about an analogy for it. There is no other profession in the world to compare it to. A singer only singing songs about singing songs? Barry Manilow sort of did that I guess, but imagine if that song were about singing the song instead of writing it.
So you see the pickle I got myself into. I close the boring 'I have been published once again' post and move on to the blogs of the comment-ers.
You know who comments on writer's blogs? You guessed it, other writers.
But hey, they can't all really write about writing, right? Well, yes they can. I will admit that there was one or two that actually wrote about their lives, but most of them just wrote about writing. And when they are not writing about writing, they are writing about reading about writing on another writer's blog.
My head hurts.
How can people who write books that actually engage and entertain, be so completely boring with their blogs? Maybe because no one is paying to read the blog, so why put anything interesting in it?
Guess you have to buy the book.
2 comments:
Thanks for pausing long enough to comment on my blog. I can't speak for other writers but do try to not be too stultifying. Of course, my blog has that "oh my Lord, another post about her kid" problem. Oh, let me tell you what she did this morning....
Kidding. Have a nice day. Hope the blog winds blow you by my site again.
Funny you should say this. I was thinking recently about all the comments I've read, written by writers, concerning the writing process. 'I write because I have to.' 'I write because I have no choice in the matter.' 'I write because to not write would be like not breathing.'
There are far better quotes than this (the best one was by William Burroughs, but I can't remember it, frustratingly enough - something about writing filling him with a dreary sense of despair at his own mediocrity). The point is that no other profession, as far as I'm aware, produces this obsessive analysis of its private bits. You don't hear accountants waxing to the tune of 'To not invoice is to die a llttle death each day.'
Even amongst the creative fields I don't think (I could be wrong here, since i'm more interested in writers than say painters, and painters aren't always writing their thoughts and opinions down)- but I don't think painters or sculptors or rap artitsts have such an interest in analysing why they became waht they did. Maybe its because so many people secretly burn with the ambition to become published writers that the demand for these opinions is so great. Its not that writers go on about it - its that people are constantly asking the question, hoping for the holy grail of answers to magically transport them away from their tv sets each night, into a little back room gilded with the mystical light of Creativity. This is nonsense,as any good writer trys to tell us. Roald Dahl dryly commented that the main factor involved in writing a book is getting your bum into a chair.
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