Blogging: I, Too, Dislike It*

In case you missed it, author Rebecca Kauffman wrote an article for Publishers Weekly a week or two ago about her resistance to social media. Kauffman sums up what I’ve been thinking about that subject for years, but to borrow from Alexander Pope, she wrote “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.”

Confession: I actually don’t like blogging. For one thing, I don’t think anyone reads my blog. And for another, having conversations with strangers makes me a little uncomfortable. And finally, I can’t shake the feeling that while I’m blogging a blog nobody reads, I could be spending that time writing a book.

So why do I have a blog or any of that stuff? Because publishers want writers to have those things. I wonder sometimes what JD Salinger would have done had he written in this day and age. Or Faulkner! Just imagine, the man who gave up his job as postmaster by writing in his resignation letter, “I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp” having to put something about himself online week after week and having to delete all the “what a great post” comments from hair tonic robots! In one of the collections of Faulkner’s letters I read some years ago, he told a friend about receiving letters from readers. He said something to the effect of, “I suppose I ought to answer them, but I don’t.”

I guess when you’re Faulkner you can do what you want.

The rest of us who write, I suppose, will have to continue to hide in plain sight on the internet…because that has become part of it.

*Title of today’s blog is a nod to a much better poem from a much better writer.