Rant about blogging pressure part 2

[msagara]

Rant about blogging, part 2 sort of

ETA: No one is pressuring me to blog; for some reason, no one ever has. So the pressure I resent is not being applied to me -- it's making people I really like miserable.

But the real reason I hate all the pressure to blog besides the fact that so many people don't understand how it works?

Because it's being applied to people who, being writers, often already shoulder enough doubt and fear, and it's being sold as "you're failing your book if you don't." I'm sure that people don't intend to do this, but it's bullying, and it's something that a lot of writers – balancing careers, children, day jobs or schooling in any number of combinations don't need. It's like being told to go out and join the in-crowd or the popular crowd when you're in junior high and you're a geek because then you will be ... more popular. Most of us have outgrown that paradigm – but just in case you want to stay on that side of the fence, there's the reminder that your books need this.

It brings back all kind of awkward, and people don't need that kind of awkward. And if the people offering this advice paid a bit more attention to the dynamics of blogging, I think they'd be less likely to apply this kind of pressure.

It's like telling someone that the sure-fire way to be a bestselling writer is to be a movie star – and then expecting them to go be a movie star; the scale is smaller, but the phenomenon is not appreciably different, imho. Some of us can act. Some of us can't. Most of us will never be movie stars, even if we are all forced to audition. But the auditions, such as they are, and stretching a metaphor to near-breaking, can make the entire process of dealing with the writing insecurities so much worse.

Look, I blog because I enjoy it. I tend to say more or less what I'm thinking about a narrow range of subjects. There are things I won't talk about because I don't feel I own them completely (my kids, for instance). But I enjoy blogging in part because no one is standing over my shoulder metaphorically breathing down my neck and telling me I have to somehow endear myself to people that I don't know and might never meet, with the subtext of failing-your-book wedged in there.

Comments

[msagara.livejournal.com]

If you don't mind me asking, how has pretty much instant access changed the process as an author? I mean before the internet and I wanted to know about a book, I'd have to either read part of it/hope for the best or ask someone else who read it what they think, but now, it's almost like oversaturation.

First, of course I don't mind. I'm actually perfectly happy to answer questions asked here, or to riff on questions asked of other lj users in their own LJs if I know I'm going to go on for a bit. Which, sadly, I frequently do.

It's something I haven't really thought about before now, because I was reading (and even occasionally posting) in the newsgroups in the early '80s. I was emailing my friends at the University, and then at other Universities, from about that time on, so I had access to the internet before I sold my first novel, and in fact, before I wrote it. The internet was not the web as it is now constituted; my sff.net site was designed so I could access it from Lynx because I would not web-surf on a dial-up, and therefore logged in to my University account via a VT100 terminal emulator.

rolanni brings up good points in her answer – there's a lot more opportunity to interact with readers. The down side – for me – is that there's a lot more guilt when I fail to interact in anything approximating a timely fashion.

But in terms of the process of actually writing a novel? I don't think it affects very much. It affects the length of time it takes to submit manuscripts (and the postage costs).

If you're subject to fretting (and frequently I am), you learn not to web-surf for information about your own titles when you're already in the middle-of-a-book writing slump and you're pulling all your hair out and punching holes in walls (figuratively speaking) because generally, it just doesn't help – the good reviews are stressful because you know that what you are writing Right Now is so much worse and people will be disappointed and the bad reviews are stressful because, well, bad reviews.

But the upside is that it's far easier to find communities of writers who are also experiencing the same levels of stress, because it's so much easier to be objective about their work – i.e. you know that they're stressed out about nothing. Which is encouraging not because misery loves company (well, okay, there is that), but rather because it gives hope that you are also, in fact, completely unable to look at your own work rationally at that time.

But as a reader? I think it makes a big difference.