What is a blog? Am I a blogger? Should a blog change the way I think and write?
During the first week in December, I am leading a seminar at Poynter titled “From Report to Column to Blog.” I’ll have the help of such brainiacs as Matt Thompson, Jay Rosen and Josh Benton, along with a team of Poynterites. Our goal is to help journalists become better bloggers; and to help bloggers make their work more journalistic –- if that is their goal. We want to help professionals and amateurs. To paraphrase Jay Rosen, it’s a pro-am event.
Along the way, I’m sure we’ll be asking these questions over and over: What is a blog? Will being a blogger change the way I think, report and write? Can I learn something called blogging style? Should the blogger strive for what writers like to call a distinctive, authentic voice?
So, in literary terms, is a blog a genre like the sonnet sequence or the ship’s log? Is it a mode like sentimentality, pornography, or explanatory journalism? And what are its antecedents? Is a blog like a commonplace book, a set of journal entries, an electronic diary? In hunting down the answers, can we make some general statements about writing strategies that will help bloggers grow in their craft?
I’ll step out onto the limb and declare my belief that blog writing is more of a mode than a genre. By that I mean that its use of language is intended to bring about a broad purpose, which includes the calling together of a community of interest, the establishment of codes or no-codes of good and bad behavior, the celebration of the self-governing wisdom of the crowd, and the lowering of thresholds of participation.
The formal requirements of an informal style
Fostering something that looks like conversation in such a virtual community requires a degree of informality. But as any good writer, and any pre-teen texter knows, there are formal requirements for the creation of an effective informal style. So what are they?
For the text messenger, the style of writing, maybe we should name it Zero Writing, can often be expressed in language that looks like it has no form at all. To the untrained eye, unfamiliar with the acronymic, telegraphic, and emoticonic communication, the writing looks like a secret code, designed to bond some, but keep others out.
But IMHO, the requirements of such a style are as rigid as Morse Code.
Look at this simple text message exchange between a mom and her daughter looking for each other at a crowded high school football game:
The rays won!
Woohoo.
Where are you guys?
Can you pick me up?
Sure. Be there in 15 minutes.
Okay. Just text me when you’re here.
Are you coming?
Yes. But give me a little more time.
Hello?
Min away.
Shut up.
The need for quick communication and the small size of the cell phone screen conspire to invite a style that is breezy and abbreviated. Questions and answers. Fragments. Slang. Exclamation points, interjections (woohoo), and that smiley face that I want to squash like a bug, are among the formal requirements for informality.
Literary precedents for the blog
In looking for literary precedents for the blog, I bumped into an old college text of mine, a book that in 1968 I found electrifying: “Love’s Body” by Norman O. Brown. Brown was one of those authors and philosophers of the 1960s whose work became part of the counterculture, which made it popular in its time, only to burn out like an old star.
“Love’s Body” is about myth, culture, religion, politics and Freud, expressed in provocative aphorisms, compiled into short fiery paragraphs. Here are three:
The truth concealed from the priest and revealed to the warrior: that this world always was and is and shall be ever-living fire. Revealed to the lover too: every lover is a warrior; love is all fire. Chandogya Upanishad, V. iii 7. Heraclitus, frg. 29
Broken flesh, broken mind, broken speech. Truth, a broken body: fragments, or aphorism; as opposed to systematic form or methods: ‘Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.’ Bacon in McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy, 102-103
This last paragraph speaks of the fragmentary nature of truth, Brown’s defense of his own aphoristic style. Brown, then, might have approved of Twitter, with its limit of 140 characters per message.
In addition, I’m struck by the way in which Brown includes “links” to other sources in a unique system of footnoting. As he explains on the first page of text, “Thanks to the publishers, a page has been designed which, by including the references in the body of the text, is a perpetual acknowledgement of my indebtedness to a very great company, both living and dead: my authorities, my authors.”
This foreshadows the same spirit I see in good blogs, a willingness to send you off from the text in search of additional links for information, wisdom, and inspiration.
Blasts from the past
As long as we’re traveling back in time, let’s examine the style of literary informality exhibited by diarists of the past.
As I write this, George Orwell’s diaries are being republished in chronological order, day by day, on a special Web site. Here is the first entry, dated August 9, 1938, about an incident in his garden:
Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2′ 6″ long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on back of neck, a mark resembling an arrow head ( Î ) all down the back. Not certain whether an adder, as these I think usually have a sort of broad arrow mark (^) all down the back. Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite. Marx interested at first, but after smelling it was frightened & ran away. The people here normally kill all snakes. As usual, the tongue referred to as “fangs.”
While seeming unpolished compared to his fiction or non-fiction, the entry exhibits the elements of a formal informality: the exclusion of many functional words, the preference for fragments or simple sentences, the inclusion of diagrammatic symbols. But none of that can conceal the author’s touch: the specificity of observation and detail; the Edenic myth of the snake in the garden; the quick narrative of the man, and then the family dog, encountering the snake. (And, of course, like any good reporter he names the dog, and what a sweet revelation that the family mutt may have been named after Karl or Groucho Marx, the author of the Communist Manifesto or of “Duck Soup.”)
What is so cool about this republishing of Orwell’s diaries is that the entries have been organized as a contemporary blog, with links, resources, and comments, an almost perfect marriage of old school and new school sensibilities.
Another famous proto-blogger is Samuel Pepys, the 17th century diarist who could not keep his peeps to himself. Featured as a character in the movie “Stage Beauty,” Pepys is portrayed as an omni-present figure in the daily life of London’s courts, theaters, and public houses. Sometimes a fly on the wall, sometimes the elephant in the room, Pepys records the coming and goings of princes and paupers with a distinctive style and an unquenchable curiosity.
In his diary entry of Sept. 2, 1666, he is awakened by news of a great fire in the city:
So down [I went], with my heart full of trouble, to the Lieutenant of the Tower, who tells me that it began this morning in the King’s baker’s house in Pudding Lane, and that it hath burned St. Magnus’s Church and most part of Fish Street already. So I rode down to the waterside, … and there saw a lamentable fire … Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another. And among other things, the poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth [sic] to leave their houses, but hovered about the windows and balconies, till they some of them burned their wings and fell down …
I’m no expert, but this work feels like live blogging to me, what James Fenton (thanks, Josh Benton!) refers to as “reporting in its natural state,” a form of eyewitness testimony that creates its own narrative energy and style.
From letter to diary to blog
In 1923, Arthur Ponsonby described the requirements of the form in his book “English Diaries.” He argued that there is a meaningful distinction between other forms of writing and the writing of diaries, in which no “literary capacity” is necessary:
Diary writing is within the reach of every human being who can put pen to paper and no one is in a more advantageous position than anyone else for keeping a diary. People of all ages and degrees, who may never have ventured to write a line for publication and may be quite incapable of any literary effort, are able to keep a diary the value of which need not in any way suffer from their literary incapacity. On the contrary, literary talent may be a barrier to complete sincerity.
This is a startling claim, almost clairvoyantly postmodern in its egalitarian sensibilities. And written in 1923. Ponsonby, I have no doubt, would love the blog for its value to professionals and amateurs alike. But he would draw some immediate distinctions between blog and diary, as he does between diary and letter.
Ponsonby argues that the letter is written for an audience of two: the writer and a particular reader, but that the diary has an audience of one, the writer. “A diary can be written with no thought whatever of the discriminating eye of a publisher, or the critical eye of a reviewer, or even of the interested or bored eye of a reader. No pause is needed for modeling phrases, no attention need be given to form, even grammar can go to the winds, and above all there need be no explanations. All restraints can be lifted and in the open fields of fact and fancy the diarist can browse, repose or gallop along at his own sweet will.”
I’ve heard, second hand, that Jay Rosen was attracted to the blog as a form because, among other things, it allowed him to say what he wanted, when he wanted, to whatever audience he could attract. He did not have to pass his work past “the discriminating eye of a publisher”; he is his own publisher. But no blogger can avoid the critical eye of a reviewer, or the eyes of readers, who turn out to be his or her most avid reviewers.
Using other descriptors from Ponsonby, I would argue that blogs and diaries, of a certain kind, share features such as their daily-ness, their attention to the moment rather than to factual accuracy, and their tendency to reveal, directly or indirectly, the inner workings of the writer. The diarist does this in private, the blogger for a virtual audience.
This final passage from Ponsonby seems to apply to both diary and blog:
…The variety displayed in diary writing as regards method, regularity and style is endless. In writing history, fiction or even letters you may adapt your style to the model of some admired author. In diary writing this is much more difficult. If you are making daily entries the effort is too great; you have no time to think, you do not want to think, you want to remember, you cannot consciously adopt any particular artifice; you jot down the day’s doings either briefly or burst out impulsively here and there into detail; and without being conscious of it, you yourself emerge and appear out of the sum total of those jottings, however brief they may be.
That phrase “sum total” leads me to a concluding insight, borrowed from Don Fry, who once described literary “voice” as: the sum of all the techniques used by the writer to create the illusion that the writer is speaking directly to the reader from the page. So maybe we have returned to a couple of key questions: “What is a blog?” And “How do we describe (and create) the voice of the blogger?”
I’m struck that when I read the diaries of dead writers, I find some deadly dull and others rippling with energy and curiosity. I can say the same of blogs. I wonder now what makes the difference. I hope we discover it in our December, and hope that some of you can join us.
