Why Blog?

Why do people blog? All kinds of people blog these days - geeks, stay-at-home-moms, artists, critics, agents, writers, especially writers - and why?

Is it mostly for themselves? A way to kill time? A way to work out their emotional baggage? To put into words the ideas jumbling up their brains? To promote those ideas?

I've been thinking about this lately. I have several blogs, most of them abandoned along the way, on a variety of topics under a variety of names. I've tried different host companies: started with LiveJournal (quit them when the ads appeared), went to WordPress, which I still use for a couple, and now on Blogspot.

Why so many blogs? Why some that started strong and then faded? Why some that started out with an idea and a name but never evolved from there? Am I such a complex person? Or just too scattered? Trying to do too many things in my limited time?

Why this new writing blog? What do I hope to accomplish here? So far I've just been working out some of my questions and concerns about my own writing. Nothing important, really, to anyone else. Maybe tangentially helpful to those few who've stumbled upon me here.

Why the recent push for writers to have blogs? This article in Salon was rather depressing for someone who'd rather be home in sweatpants, reading, than going on the road, or the Internet, to self promote. But it's the way of the New World of Publishing.

I try to keep up with blogs I like, but it's time consuming. Amanda Hocking wrote how "... the hours spent in self-promotion are hours spent not writing." On the flip side of that, the hours spent reading other people's self-promotion are hours spent not writing, too. 


I'm sorry if I'm not the best at following all the blogs on my "to read" list and making comments and playing along with blogging games. Sometimes I read blog postings I like but just have nothing to add, so I don't comment. Do I wish people would comment on mine? Well, yeah, so I have to make the effort too. 


Do I feel as if I'm just talking to myself here? Most of the time. Do page views matter? I'm not sure. Do page views, the stats that show how many people have clicked on my blog,  translate into anything useful or important? Perhaps it will when I have books or stories I want people to buy. When I have something to promote. 


For now, I'm just writing out my thoughts. And that's ok with me. 

On Pruning, and Editing

A few days ago I spent a couple of hours pruning the deadwood out of a Japanese laceleaf maple tree. It's a beautiful tree, but hasn't been well groomed for at least the four years we've lived here. Not sure about its previous history.

I wasn't familiar with these trees until I moved to the Pacific Northwest a few years ago. They're quite marvelous, little fantasy trees with soft, fine foliage that turns a brilliant dark red in the fall before they drop their leaves for the winter. And twisting, winding, gnarly branches that define their shape.

When not pruned, they have a tendency to look like Cousin It from the Addams Family. (If that's before your time, sorry!) The beauty of their structure is lost behind all of the fluff. Here's what it's looked like in a previous summer, the mauve one behind the lime green:

And here's what it looks like almost naked, in the late fall:

When trimmed, you can see the architecture, the truth of the tree itself. The tree reveals itself to you, becomes accessible, understandable, the character of the tree ...

Oops - what did I just say there? Character. That brings me back into the realm of writing.

While I was pruning this tree, I thought about how I also needed to prune my work in progress, my mystery  novel that has just gotten way too bushy. It started out as just a seed of my imagination, a tiny little kernel that had promise but no substance. I watered it with my daydreaming, and gave it sunshine when I pondered it walking to work, and gradually it began to sprout. The leaves appeared, and then more, and some branches started poking out to the sides at odd angles, and twisting back on themselves, and now I need to do some good editing on it.

And as with pruning my maple, different parts need different levels of edit. In some areas, there's just some deadwood that can be trimmed away easily, without much thought at all. Clip it off and toss aside. And some small branches that haven't gotten too out of sync can be gently trimmed, guiding them back into the structure. But some places, well, they're bigger and need more consideration in the pruning. It's tempting to just cut them way back, to the trunk even, to the place where they started to have a life of their own. But maybe that's not the best way. After all, those big branches, or subplots, have a lot of little twigs, or character or action sequences, of their own. Just hacking them off will destroy all of those twigs as well. 

In some ways it's easier to prune a tree than to edit a novel. It's visible, right there in front of me. I can see the shape, the twisting branches are clearly visible, and it's easy to tell how the twigs are attached to the branches. I can physically touch them, my fingers following them from tip to trunk, feeling how any pruning would affect the whole tree.

On the other hand, editing a novel is easier, because the whole structure can be saved as a "first draft" file and reinstated if I decide the edits were too extensive. Just copy/paste and bingo! Those clipped twigs and sawn off branches are magically restored.

But then the issue becomes when to stop. When to stop second-guessing the edits and just let the novel be itself. With pruning, you get one chance. You make a decision, lop off the chosen piece and it's done. Over. No waffling. No super-glueing it back together.

Thinking, and pruning, and editing.