A personal history of blogging and varieties of writing

My first novel, Laika in Lisan, was self-published on Amazon a few days ago. I’ve read that authors should keep a blog to help promote themselves and their work, so here I am.

Back before “blogging” was a household term, I kept a public diary (which I eventually made private) at DiaryLand. I just skimmed the History of Blogging entry on Wikipedia, and it amuses me to see DiaryLand as one of the first “hosted blog tools.” I joined DiaryLand in June 2000 and kept my account for about four years, although I opened a LiveJournal account in December 2002 and quickly began using that more often. Originally, my blogging was intimate and personal; it was all about venting, expression, and self-discovery. As more and more of my friends joined the blogging communities, my posts became less personal. Instead, I used my posts to communicate and share my life with friends. In fact, for many years LiveJournal was the primary medium through which I communicated with my “online friends.” (I’ve been friends with those people for nearly 15 years and many of us have met multiple times. Those relationships are actually my longest-standing active friendships right now.)

Around 2003-2004, I went from posting in LJ nearly every day to posting once every few months. I used LJ to check in with friends, and eventually I only posted when I had something important to share (e.g., a job interview). However, around this time I also kept a completely private LiveJournal that I wrote in constantly (sometimes multiple times a day). I continued to write in my private journal regularly until around 2006. What changed? One word: Steve. Previously, keeping a private journal was how I processed and dealt with life events. When I met Steve, talking with him satisfied this need.

Blogging is so common now, but it seems quite different from the DiaryLands and LiveJournals of the early 2000s. Those tools lent themselves easily to introspection and self-reflection. (Perhaps it was inherent in the titles: “diary” and “journal” have very different connotations than “blog.”) They were also a great way to build relationships with friends through self-disclosure. In contrast, blogging today—or at least my impression of it—is primarily a professional practice. Blogs seem to be mostly used for self-promotion (I don’t mean this in a bad way; it’s a tool for building one’s public identity, which is essential for many careers) or as a professional activity in and of itself.

So, what about this blog? It will certainly be used for professional self-promotion. There will be no intimate self-disclosures here. (Or wait! Is that a lie? I suppose my history of blogging is a fairly personal disclosure.)

At this point, I want to reflect on varieties of writing. Professional blog writing is new and difficult for me because it is so unlike the other forms of writing I’m constantly engaged in. (Plus, this feels superfluous… There are so many blogs out there. Who really wants to hear what I have to say? My opinion and activities aren’t particularly exciting.)

Email: This is my most frequent form of writing. The number of emails I send varies from day to day, with weekdays being the busiest. The emails range in length from 2-3 sentences to many paragraphs, from casual notes to professional discourse. Email writing is fairly easy, although when I was younger (specifically: about 12-14 years ago) I would agonize over the content of my emails. When I began a career where email writing was the primary means of communication, I had no choice but to get over it. Now I shoot off my emails within seconds of finishing them (I proofread the more important ones, of course).

Academic writing: This is my second most frequent form of writing. I am very proud of my academic writing. It’s a skill I’ve honed over many years, and it gives me tremendous pleasure when a reviewer compliments the writing in a manuscript I’ve submitted for publication. (Sadly, my writing is often better than the data I’m writing about.) The downside to this well-honed skill is that it has become how I write. Two of the 10 people who beta-read Laika in Lisan told me that my writing was fairly formal. For example, I almost never used contractions. This realization was quite a shock. The skills and habits that made my academic writing so good—precise vocabulary (words that rarely appear in regular conversation), succinct sentences, formal transitions, and scientific detachment—were not conducive to easy-to-read fiction writing. Once my attention had been drawn to this, I made an effort to change (and my editor, Marcy Sheiner, helped a great deal). However, as you can probably tell from reading this, my automatic habit is still stiff, formal writing.

Fiction writing: This is probably obvious, but wow—this is so different from academic writing! Writing the first draft of Laika in Lisan was all about working out the details of the story itself. All of my attention went to creating the dialogue and determining characters’ actions, leaving little attention for agonizing over correct word choice and sentence structure. The latter usually didn’t occur until  I was editing my own writing.

This post is way too long, so let’s stop there and call it a day.