Concrete & Chalk: Ruminations on blogging by A.S. Patric [18.10.2011]
This is the first instalment of a three-part series on blogging. We’d like to share the thoughts of three prolific bloggers and get their impressions on how the relatively free-form online space compliments and/or diverts from print publishing.
Part 2: Things You Can Tell Just by Blogging by Laurie Steed
There’s a chalk outline on the concrete. We imagine a sprawled-out body with one hand raised as though waving. At some point early on, writers realise that the space within the chalk balloon belongs to them and soon begin returning to it with totems. An old typewriter. The nub of a pencil. Notebooks. Letters of acceptance or rejection in a bundle. Artefacts accumulate. Books and trophies bearing our names seem ideal for filling in the outline on the ground. We return to this retrospective view of our lives again and again but no writer ever comes back to it with a blog.
Perhaps it’s because the best we can achieve with a blog, (if we are not secretly hoping to have it promoted into book form as Krissy Kneen and a few other writers have done) is to garner a few comments from fellow writers. It doesn’t get much better than that. No Nobel awaits. The artefact melts away quickly. A post gets old after a few days and we begin thinking about what next to produce for a small coterie of literary comrades.
If a writer holds to this perspective their blog will fail within weeks or months, (the usual lifespan of the blog). Investing considered thought—focused narrative forms—into electronic veils does not give the same satisfaction as chiselling words into stone. There’s another way of approaching an online creative space and that’s to break with a Stone Age mind frame. To release the idea of permanence and readership and open up a new channel for emerging forms within our own process.
Writing is often a monumental act. A writer will summon up determination and courage and attempt a novel, moving with colossal intention from one phrase to the next. Writing can be a more intimate part of our daily lives, intended not only for transmission to spectral audiences far and wide, but also for ourselves. The literary qualities we have devoted ourselves to can be absorbed into the membrane of our daily lives, giving unique narrative to our private existence.
Most of us begin with paper. A notebook for a few thoughts, character details, ideas for stories… a private place to sigh and thrill—in words intended for our eyes alone. Some writers have scribbled out their entire creative DNA in these kinds of books. It is interesting to juxtapose Anais Nin, who produced her diaries for publication and found lasting recognition through them, and Henry James, who in the final days of his life, destroyed as many of his notebooks as he could: one suggesting the creation is all that is relevant, the other showing the creator in the midst of art. There is also a question here in whether our primary intention is to project ourselves into art or to channel art into ourselves.
If some writers scrap the paper and move directly to composition, producing nothing but extended prose, they give themselves no space to explore their creative possibility other than within the heavier, determined medium of the literary artefact itself. Within the blogging space the writer now has a place where a sketch can grow into a fully formed image, which might continue to expand into a large scale sequence, developing organically into a short story, novel, memoir, etc. The blog offers the writer a moving surface to range out these potentials, allowing a vital admixture of exposure and time into his or her process.
The medium is not just a frame. It affects every word that takes shape. Carving words into stone is so laborious we only ever get the essentials. Date of Birth. Death. Name. Beloved: Wife/Mother/Father/Husband/Son/Daughter. Biblical/Poetic Phrase. Paper maintains a similar expectation. It is a formal space. The words need to carry a higher value, invoking depth and density, even if the prose itself poses as casual, passing banter. The words need to be at least worth the cost of publication. A blogpost responds only to our creative desires and needs, and its production is free.
A blog can be a stage in the development of our work or personal evolution, yet the medium itself offers possibilities some writers will find liberating. So far, the most successful literary blogs have created a place for the bookish equivalent of a great phone conversation. Still to be seen is a new form; a unique blogging creation. Flash fiction has been growing to maturity, especially where prose is driven by concision and precision, delivered in the sudden space of a post. Blogs will continue to grow diurnally, offering an aesthetic of the in-transit—catching the attention of the distracted, overwhelmed, burnt-out reader with new forms of focus, rest and renewal.
The secret of art is that the sublime will always find ways to struggle through whatever comes to hand. Oil pigments on cheap canvas or applied directly to walls leads to the Renaissance. Printing presses produce novels. The excess of military brass instruments after the American Civil war provide Jazz the tools to develop. Images fixed into film-thin plastic frames and passed through a shaft of light usher in cinema. The blog uses a different kind of light through other frames, but we will watch only a little while longer before the sublime breaks through again.
Writers will continue to find the greatest satisfaction in artefacts like the book and trophy. We turn ourselves into words and having those words made into something solid again is part of the bargain. (It seems a paltry existence if that’s all we hope to leave as evidence of having lived). Perhaps we can’t help sketching out the body on the concrete in chalk, looking to fill the shape with a biography worthy of a life. There are ways we allow for the superfluous, overabundant, exuberant to emerge and fill out the picture of a person lying on the concrete, delighted by every passing thing, crossing the open sky above.
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