Things You Can Tell Just by Blogging by Laurie Steed [24.10.2011]

This is the second 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 1: Concrete & Chalk: Ruminations on blogging by A.S. Patric

Blogs used to be great. They were windows to troubled souls, a psychological choose your own adventure. You could read about people’s lives and comment if you felt so inclined. More importantly, blogs offered online interaction when interactivity was sorely lacking.

Today blogs feel tired, or at the very least in need of invigoration. These days, everything is interactive. We now Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, news sites and micro-blogs. Where does that leave traditional blogging? Well that depends. If you’re a blogger of expertise or a collaborative blogger, then you’re still in good shape. Take the literary sphere: I don’t surf for new blogs but I regularly check in with those blogs I know and trust. In my world, that’s SPLOG, LiteraryMinded, The Column, Verity La and Killings. What about writer’s personal blogs? I rarely read them. Why? Well, I’d rather read a writer’s selected thoughts than their everyday meanderings. I’d rather explore what they write, rather than what they choose to discuss.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run your own blog, but it does mean you’re indebted to make it interesting. Local lit is already showcased in Radio National’s The Book Show, RRR’s Aural Text, breakaway podcast The Rereaders and JOMAD and ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club. If you’re covering similar territory to any of these programs, your thoughts run the risk of being more echo than shout. Blogs are also competing with books, TV, and films, not to mention the rest of the Internet. Given a choice between watching a DVD and reading about the life of a writer, most will choose the former, if only because they’re tired, stressed, and have to work in the morning.

None of this stops me writing blog posts, nor should it stop you. Ultimately it comes down to why you’re blogging in the first place. Blogs works best when they’re about interaction rather than promotion; if you enjoy connecting with a small but loyal group of readers then by all means start a blog and enjoy the conversation. If you’re planning on being the next literary “it” boy or girl, then please, save the world from another self-indulgent blog and just hire a publicist.

In a digital market, much is free. Your time is not, and running a blog takes a lot of time, both to write original content and to make sure your blog is suitably tech-savvy, incorporating widgets, buttons and twitter streams. As a writer, do you have that time? More importantly, are you the type of writer who enjoys being permanently plugged in? If you’re Max Barry you lap it up and prosper, but for others it creates an existential nightmare.

Now is a uniquely beneficial time in blogging history. As a writer, you can take part in a quality collaborative blog without having to maintain your own. The blogs mentioned earlier have built loyal and dedicated fan-bases, and they all want quality content. What does this mean? It means if you can write well, you can choose where your work appears. Along the way, you’ll build a professional profile, creating win-win relationships with the best in the business. It’s not necessarily better, but is certainly easier than setting up your own blog and spending the majority of your time creating content, hoping someone, somewhere will recognise your genius.

Still worried you won’t get discovered without your own blog? To that I say Cate Kennedy, Peter Carey, Steven Amsterdam, Nam Le, Alex Miller, Karen Hitchcock, Kim Scott and Patrick Cullen. A couple of these authors have excellent websites (and I’d definitely recommend getting one of those) but none run their own blog. Or to put it another way, some writers write while others lead the discussion. A precious few do both. It’s impossible to be everything to everyone, and therefore begs the question: which type of writer are you?

Laurie Steed is a writer, editor and reviewer based in Perth, Western Australia. A recipient of Varuna and Rosebank fellowships in 2011, his work has featured in various publications including the Age, Meanjin, and Sleepers Almanac. He’s a PhD Student in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australian, fiction editor for various journals and an active member of the EWF Program Advisory Committee. When not working, he likes to hibernate like the bear, and to a lesser extent, the European Hedgehog.

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