Blogger Agonistes
Emily finds that book-editing has adversely affected her blogging:
I do think that blog-writing is a different kind of writing than edited printed-matter writing [but now] I keep doubling back and second-guessing and tweaking my word choices and my grammar in even the most basic (i.e., m-dash-free) of sentences…
At some point during this process… I lost the heedless confidence that is necessary to blog-writing. This heedless confidence, you may have guessed — or if you have a blog, you may already know – is the blog-writer’s Achilles heel, and also his greatest strength. (That’s where his strength is! In his heel!)
Like any writing made time-sensitive by deadlines or audience expectations, blogging is somewhat inimical to the editing that books, poems, short stories and feature-length articles are subject to and (theoretically) improved by. But anyone who’s sat through the arguments that can take flight in writing workshops knows that not all editing is created equal. And without deadlines we get Chinese Democracy and Profane Friendship. Like Emily, I’d take posts by Choire Sicha (or Alex Balk or Moe Tkacik or Laura McKenna) over many bound books or articles in the MSM.
The odd thing about blogging is that, as Melissa noted a few weeks ago:
You can cook up a post in a couple hours and watch it generate national controversy, then spend a month reporting an actual edited piece (on a far more controversial subject) and watch it barely splash the surface before sinking into Google-able obscurity.
For a long time, there was a direct correlation between dissemination and editorial oversight: more of one likely meant more of the other. The Internet is the one medium where this no longer holds true. But oversight isn’t about quality per se; it’s about meeting a publisher’s standards. In the Preface to his Stories, John Cheever writes about working under Harold Ross at The New Yorker:
He taught one, I think, that decorum is a mode of speech, as profound and connotative as any other, differing not in content but in syntax and imagery. Since the men [!] he encouraged ranged as widely as Irwin Shaw and Vladimir Nabokov, he seems to have done more good than anything else.
In the same Preface, Cheever writes that
My favorite stories are those that were written in less than a week, and that were often composed aloud.
Doesn’t sound too different than blogging.
