Writing...

[fajrdrako]

Blogging. Ever since Robin Hobb wrote her piece on how writers should be getting on with the act of writing, not messing around on journaling, I've been struggling with a thread of guilt. Especially since certain people like maaseru have pointed to the article, and said, "It's absolutely right." And I think guiltily: "if I spend x number of minutes writing LJ instead of fic...."

But it isn't a simply syllogism. I can write a ten-minute LJ entry, easily, and do it often. I can't write fic in segments ten minutes. Usually it takes ten minutes to figure out what my scene is and where I'm going with it. Or sometimes I can, but it isn't the same sort of ten minutes. Fiction has its own parameters.

When there was no blogging in my life or anyone else's, I still kept journals. The difference is that no one but me saw them. (Well, except that time my husband started reading my pre-marriage journals to see what I'd said about him, and what a bad idea that was.) I spent daily time in writing letters to friends - I had dozens of pen-pals. I was in apazines. (Many apazines.) It was all the same blogging impulse.

I remind myself of this, when I find myself feeling guilt for writing in LJ and enjoying it. I see no reason to decide that one form of writing is better than another - any more than one kind of reading is better than another, or one kind of movie or TV show over another.

LJ is fun, and it's a stress reliever, and right now it's a much-needed lifeline to the world outside my apartment. Of course I love it.

sartorias's LJ got me thinking about this again. I'm trying to live without guilt about the things I love to do: it makes sense that some find LJ a pleasure in itself, and other people don't.

Comments

[spherissa.livejournal.com]

I don't agree with her piece but I don't think it's ase idn capitalism, mor ein the seeking for something less transitory.

(tht was me not being signed in)

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

the seeking for something less transitory

Yes - the creation of something permanent and lasting. Which I agree is laudable. But I don't think that makes LJ worthless, or a handicap to the creation of lasting literature, it's another form - the kind of thing that has existed in other forms in the past, like the ubiquitous letter-writing of the 18th century - we tend to remember people like Fielding and Pope and Diderot, but all over Europe, the literate classes were writing letters like mad, and their own poems and doggerel and bits of ephemera, and having a great time of it. And I've heard people who say, "Why don't people write letters like they used to?" The answer: because we write with the technology that suits us all best.

I think the Popes and the Fieldings and others of their genius will appear when and as they must, because that's who they are, while the rest of us do our own things.