Need to practice writing? Write a blog or two.
sure that nearly everyone I know—both in person and via the Net—reads blogs,
and a lot of those people write blogs, too.
ComputerHope, a nifty website that I went to for help when I was writing
about Herta’s new (in 1990) computer for the reader’s guide for
Secret Lives gives this definition for blog, a word that was apparently
first used in 1998: A weblog or blog, is a listing of text, images, or
other objects that are arranged in a chronological order that first started
appearing in 1998. Blogs are often maintained and run by a single individual,
updated daily, or contain random personal remarks about a topic, a personal
ramble, an update on the person's life or their current feelings. In many
ways, many weblogs are like a personal journal, diary or a look into another
individual's life and can be a great way to learn about people, events,
places, and much more from millions of people around the world.
I write two so-called regular blogs, this one and a monthly blog for
Feminism and Religion. For FAR, I’ve worked ahead so that
Xochitl Alviso, who posts my blogs for me because I’m a technological
nincompoop, has me scheduled for the next two or three months. Later today
I plan send her my Christmas blog, which is about gods (including Jesus)
who were said to be born around the time of the winter solstice. (We don’t
know exactly when Jesus was born, probably in the fall or the spring between
7 and 4 BCE. What we do know is that in 354, Bishop Liberius of Rome moved
the birth date of Jesus to match the birth date of Roman god Mithra. For
more about the solar gods, check back with FAR around Christmastime or
read December 25 in
Pagan Every Day .) (But—good grief—don’t spent over $100 for
a copy on Amazon! I can sell you one, and I'll even sign it, for $18.)
I’m one of two pagans who are regular contributors to FAR (my friend
Carol Christ is the other, and she’s the one who invited me). FAR presents a new
blog every single day. I read the FAR blogs every morning and invite you
to read them, too. I’ve also just sent a fairy tale about Egyptian goddesses
to Xochitl to see if it might be a good blog. (“Blog” is sometimes pretty
loosely defined; a British scholar named
Daniel Cohen, who has been active in the Goddess movement in Britain
for many years, has posted some terrific stories.)
And so today, I’m sitting here doing what the authors whose books I edit
do: I’m pulling words out of my head and pushing them out through my fingers
to my keyboard. I type awhile, then I stop and read what I just typed.
Then I go,
Oh.My.God, that doesn’t make sense at all. I immediately start editing.
When I wrote a sort of blog for a friend a few months ago, the subject
was writer’s block. In it I said (cross my heart) that I don’t believe
in writer’s block. That’s true. I don’t get blocked. Well, sometimes I
procrastinate. Sometimes I have other important things to do. Like wash
dishes. Go to the bathroom. Comb the cats. Eat lunch. Take out the trash.
(I think I’ll do that right now. Back in a minute.) I used to know people
who sharpened pencils and rearranged their bookshelves while they were
procrastinating. If you’re really good at, the list of things you can do
that are not writing is endless.
Okay, I’m back. Yes, I really believe that there’s no need to be blocked.
What do I tell people who ask me about writer’s block? Just sit down and
write! Write anything. Just get something on your screen (or on paper).
Anything. Even if it’s awful. Just get something written. You can,
and probably should, delete those “priming the pump” paragraphs, but at
least you’re getting yourself started. At the same time, I think the famous
quote by sports writer Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith is spot on:
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and
open a vein. If you’ve read or seen
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, you remember that
Cassandra gets her father, the famous novelist who’s been blocked for a
dozen years, to start again by typing “the cat sat on the mat.” It works.
If you’re feeling blocked, it’ll work for you, too,. Don’t give up.
Foul Matter by Martha Grimes is another novel about, among
other things, a blocked writer.
If you want to write, you have to practice writing. With eight published
books, a couple that may never get published (because I wrote them on a
typewriter and don’t feel like retyping and rewriting them), and a whole
lot of stories and blogs and poems, plus my Ph.D. dissertation and a stack
of term papers from graduate school that is as tall as I am, I’ve had a
lot of practice at writing. It’s never easy to write well, but if you get
enough practice, it becomes easier to get a good first or rough draft going.
Then you can edit. And edit. And edit. And hire me to do some more editing
for you. As I tell many of the authors I work with, they’ve got terrific
rough drafts (which are seldom first drafts). Here’s the metaphor I commonly
use. The rough draft is like a garden. You broadcast the seeds or stick
little plants in the ground. You wait to see what grows. Your major task
is now to weed the garden. Pull out little plants whose seeds the wind
blew in. Pull out little plants that aren’t what you thought you planted.
Pull out little plants that are likely to grow so vigorously they’ll take
over the whole garden if you leave them there. None of these little plants
are necessarily bad little plants. They’re just out of place. They might
do perfectly well in some other garden, that is, in some other story or
book, in some other context. You also have to pinch back growing tips to
make a plant of which you’re fond healthier and bushier. And of course
it’s useful to add water and fertilizer to help your garden grow. So far,
the authors with whom I’ve shared this metaphor get it. They understand
that what they sent me is an unweeded garden. We’re weeding and pinching
and pruning together.
Writing rough drafts and blogs—aha! Back to my original point!—is practice
writing. Adults keep feeding us that old cliche,
practice makes perfect. I disagree with that. What practice makes
is
familiarity. Practice touch typing and you learn how to do it without
staring at the keyboard. Practice dicing onions and you learn how to do
it without too many tears. Practice driving your car and you learn how
to do it safely. Practice using your new smart device and you learn what
those weird little finger motions and apps do. If you practice wrong, though,
then
wrong will become familiar, and you’re not likely to learn to do
it right and become familiar with right, unless you start all over again
at the bottom of the learning curve. And so it goes with writing.
That’s why blogs are useful. A blog is a short form. You can write multiple
versions of the same blog and compare them. You can fact-check them. As
you create a blog, you get to practice writing. Practice putting a coherent
sentence together. A coherent paragraph. (That’s a lesson I’ve yet to learn.)
(Sigh.) Practice concision (a lesson I received from my major professor
in graduate school. But that's another story). Learn, say, the difference
between “imply” and “infer.” Learn that “allergic foods” is not what you
mean when you’re writing about food allergies. Learn that you need to heed
Strunk & White’s Rule 11 (“A participial phrase at the beginning of
a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.”) or what you wrote won’t
be what you meant. Is it true that a journey begins with a single
step? It may be equally true that good writing begins with a single blog.
If you write a whole series of good blogs, you can even collect them and
turn the collection into a book. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it sure
is nice to have arrived at the end of this blog!
