I Used to Write, Now I Blog

The influence of blogging is overall a very positive force in the media.
-Garrett M. Graff

If you write it and publish it, your an author. If you write it and blog it-are you wasting your time? The general rule of thumb for writing a novel is to put together a thousand words a day on your way to a hundred thousand word novel. Once you have the finished rough draft, which can take anywhere from a few months to a few years, you proof read for plot logic, tweak the tension here, relax the tension there, arrange it in a semi-logical fashion with a beginning, middle and end.

A blog has no start and no finish. There is no need for any kind of structure. No need to even follow the basic form of the essay-which is what many blog attempt and not all succeed at doing. If you write it with getting hits in mind, you have to write down to the hyperactive web surfer who can’t be bothered with reading more than a few hundred words-and are likely only skimming the first sentence of each paragraph or only the headlines anyway.

Sites like Plurk and Tweeter take it to the next logical step, where a line is limited to 150 characters. The typical thought expressed on these sites is Hello, Goodbye, I hate this, I love that, and so on. There is the idea of having a conversation on these sites, but I have not seen too many of these. I have seen Plurks with hundreds of responses, but there seems to be no logical progression, just people adding random remarks.

If you write it and no one reads it, that is a bit sad. But if you write it and no one pays for it, that is even sadder. Is writing only worth doing if it’s paid for? If you write it and want to make a living from it, yes. I don’t understand professional writers who have blogs. Isn’t that a few hundred words that could be going to the daily total? Or have they made enough money already that they don’t need any more? I’m not talking Stephen King or John Grisham here, I mean writers that I have found who have only a few books published.

If you write it and want to publish it, it seems to be easier than ever before. But there also seems to be less and less people reading what is being written.

If you write it for fun, there is nothing wrong with that. Unless you have goals of writing it for a living. Time spent blogging is time that is not spent writing. I used to write short stories, I have a couple of novels sitting silently on my hard drive, and I even wrote some rather bad poetry once upon a time. Now I spend all my writing time blogging.

It is hard to say that all my efforts on If You Write It have been for naught, but they are not likely to be turned into a real world book any time soon. After all, I did not finish any of my writing projects in the past. If you write it, you really should try and get it published.

But NaNoWriMo is fast approaching, and there is the odd little bit of desire to take a break from blogging and whip out a quick novel. If you write it in thirty days, what are the odds of it ever being published? Better than if you don’t write it at all.

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