The essay by Angie Albright, “Blogging IS Real Writing,” posted Nov. 28, 2012, at Arkansas Women Bloggers, impressed me and, judging from social media reactions, many of my fellow scribes. It follows exactly from the title, an apologia for the form. I agree, blogging is writing, but skip the defensive “real.” Of course she’s being defensive, that’s her point. I defend the form, too, have for a decade.
We’re going about it wrong.
A descriptive of hers sent me to Conjecture Land. Albright cited a “Well Meaning Woman” as the impetus for her column. Our heroine found a topic for a post, and a Well Meaning Woman responded that the topic should be reserved for “real writing” instead of blogging.
Doesn’t that just set your teeth on edge? Unless you see merit in the doll’s point. If you do, I hope to knock your block off.
When print newspapers began dying, it seemed the Internet would raze the venerated genre of columns. Until the blinkered looked at the Internet and found it full of columns. Online they often but not always were called blogs. Blogs takes all forms from fact to opinion, from crusade to satire, from how-to to why-not, and from punch lines to novellas.
Back in the day, columnists, especially if they were any good, had been advised to find a more honorable form. Reporters with skill have been told “there’s a book in that story.” I’ve been stuck in a series of editor’s swivel chairs for more than three decades so I’ve heard that there’s better status in editing magazines over newspapers, editing books over magazines.
You see where this is going. Everybody, every creator, every artist is handed this line. Watercolorists are advised to work in oil because it’s more permanent. Budding rockers are advised to learn classical techniques. Watercolorists learning oil can improve their approach (oh, ancient cave paintings? water-based), and musicians improve their technique by widening the range of their teachers.
To “keep on keeping on” is not ever what’s being suggested by the critics — the Well Meaning for various reasons are proposing abandoning one form for another. Do these interlopers have the best interest of their victims? Both giver and receiver may think so, but hearing out their reasons is a black hole.
Books on writing single out these people — call them wet blankets or wet noodles, crazy makers — and to a one the experts recommend: Avoid them if possible, otherwise ignore them the best you can. That’s because many of the Well Meaning are uncomfortably close.
Bullies. To a one, even if they’re blood, even if you love them, these Well Meaning Women and Men are bullies.
If you defend your blogging — or embroidery or hand drumming or pies (“hon’, you could open a bakery”) — to these bullies you don’t solve a thing.
If you want to express yourself in a blog, or in poetry kept in a desk drawer, pay no mind to bullies.
Screenwriters at every level are told that only a novel will earn them writer privileges, while even published novelists are urged to abandon fiction for scripts because no one reads anymore — read their interviews.
My favorite master of the short form, Robert Benchley, surrendered to insecurity: Biographies state he envied his writing peers. He was on record as wanting to write a proper British history. Benchley was well-paid and popular. He was revered by contemporaries in short-form humor from E.B. White and James Thurber to the current day’s Woody Allen and Dave Barry.
We in the middle or end of the line must note that the top ranks have bully issues, from gold-medal gymnasts to quarterbacks to CEOs — all have people trying to take them down.
As a left-hander, the shortest kid in grade school, the only Jew there or in junior high, almost the only Arkansan at Stanford and so on, I should have advice on battling bullies. Not really.
What about those advice articles of recent years that are a part of an American campaign against bullying? They come to no consistent conclusions. Different bullies require different tactics, I’ve found, and you need more options than confrontation or capitulation.
My advice on bullying comes from the fact that bullying never ever stops. If school is all about learning, then that’s where you learn that for the rest of your life you will face bullies. So I am forced to be grateful to the mean from earliest childhood, acknowledge that adults in my village usually were powerless, too.
Bullies.
Fort Smith, Arkansas, taught me how to deal with bullies at Stanford, which I managed, once I got over my surprise that even Hoover Heaven it had its share of jerks. Every place in every year of life has its share of bullies. Hear this:
Know yourself, know what you want and plunge ahead. Deal with bullies as circumstances dictate. Often, there’s little to be done to thwart bullies.
Write a blog, perhaps.
Copyright 2012 Ben S. Pollock
