Written for WordWorks, Spring 2003
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Blogging for Writers / by Lynda Williams |
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Written for WordWorks, Spring 2003
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Blogging is barely five years old and already breaking into the mainstream from the wacky world of web-heads, but is blogging respectable for "real" writers? Here's a quick look at the pros and cons
If you have an aunt who recounts her holidays step-by-step or a friend who tells all about a blind date, you already know why blogs can have a dreadful reputation, but there is an even more humiliating variation out there for the writers among us: the writer's blog filled with snappy lines like "I can't think of what to write"—and that sentence was at least grammatical.
PC Magazine author John C. Dvorak accuses writers who blog of that worst-of-all-possible slanders by calling them "wanna-be" authors. His quote, below, sums up the risk of becoming a blogger for writers who want to be taken seriously.
A lot of people want to be published writers. Blogs make it happen without the hassle of getting someone else to do it or having to write well—although there is good writing to be found. Some is shockingly good. Most of it is miserable.
John C. Dvorak in "The Blog Phenomenon" PC Magazine
As you may have gathered, a blog is a diary. It has dated entries that tend to be short and express the daily observations or experiences of its author. Unlike a print diary, however, a blog can be read by anyone who visits it on the web and more than one author can contribute if granted that privilege by the blog owner. The basic blog provides no means for mere readers to give input, but there are variations that support comments. A typical blog is also restricted to text-based entries, with the newest on top, but there are variations which accommodate things like archiving and the ability to include pictures.
The term "blog" itself is a contraction of "web log", coined around 1998 when manual web logs created by people with the know-how to do them manually began to give way to blogs hosted by web portals like blogger.com. For a brisk survey of the history of blogging, visit weblogs: a history and perspective, by Rebecca Blood.
User-friendly hosting services put setting up a blog within the grasp of anyone able to fill in blanks and read instructions, but the aesthetics of any particular blog still relies on the technical and artistic skill of its author. I will provide more details on setting up and maintaining a blog, both technically and from the content point of view, after laying out my personal experience with blogging.
I have two blogs, one that I consider fun and one that is related to my "day job".
My
fiction-related blog is called Reality
Skimming and professes to cover: "The Okal Rel Universe in
evolution (with sundry reflections, ruminations and curmudgeonations on the
intrusion on reality into science fiction)." When my co-author, Alison
Sinclair, suggested setting up a blog with that mission, as a sort of public
writer's notebook, I was dubious. We already had an Okal
Rel Universe website, that was growing in a runaway fashion, and the blog
sounded like one more thing to fit into the hours I was able to apply to devote
to writing. I was also leery of the sort of reputation that blogs had, in
my limited experience of them to date, whereas Alison was getting her blog
exposure at hollylisle.com,
which is a quite delightful and diverse resource for writer seeking friendly
company as well as a promotional tool for Holly Lisle's work.
I set up Reality Skimming on blogger.com in November 2001, thinking it would be footnote to the Okal Rel Universe web presence, used mostly by myself and Alison to exchange the sort of comments we have been doing for years via e-mail. Today, just over a year later, it is one of the three main links on the Okal Rel Universe homepage, and thanks to the commenting feature Alison masterminded, a place to keep in touch with friends, readers and participants in our growing science fiction enterprise.
No classification scheme could cover all the entries made on Reality Skimming, but some of my personal favorites run to pieces of art in progress, photographs from science fiction conventions or other appearances, extracts salvaged from the cutting floor as novels get trimmed, links to resources that can serve as references and news about the people who have been involved in one way or another. When we indulge in rumination, the goal is to use Reality Skimming like a public writer's notebook. For example, if I read an article in Discover magazine about the density of matter in deep space, I might make an entry noting the implications for our fictional form of faster-then-light travel, known—aptly enough—as reality skimming.
Using
a blog as a newsletter, in my working life, was a solution inspired by expedience.
Other centers like the one I run at the University of Northern B.C., known
as the Centre for Teaching and
Learning, produce and distribute printed newsletters highlighting innovations
in teaching and examples of best practices. Printing costs money, however,
and even more critically producing a newsletter on a schedule requires lumps
of dedicated staff time. I am the only regular employee at my center, assisted
by part-time student workers who do piece work. The concentrated effort required
to produce a printed newsletter, even once a term was prohibitive given the
shortages. But doing a single article, as opportunity arose, was quite supportable.
The resulting blog, Thinking Out Loud, is a bit more formal than my fiction blog but uses exactly the same web service. I augment entries by providing links to extended reports, that are hosted on a university server, in much the way that cover stories in multi-page newsletters refer to later pages.
No one can or should decide for you whether a blog will enhance your mission as a writer, because too much depends on personal considerations, but here are some questions you should ask yourself.
If you are nervous about committing anything to do with your work to web exposure, either for personal or copyright reasons, you should think very hard before setting up any kind of web presence. Many people are unreasonably nervous, given my own experience, but there can be entirely justified reasons for balking so I will not offer blanket assurances. Anything you put on the web, including blogs, can be viewed by anyone, and any content that appears on a computer user's screen can be captured one way or another. If you create a blog, you should do it because you want as many people as possible to find it as often as possible, not because you want a private diary. You should also be positive about making entries fairly often, and comfortable being casual about it although I would advocate on behalf of writers everywhere that you shoot for the "shockingly good" and not "miserable" standard of blog authorship cited by Dvorak.
Deciding
to set up a blog is only the first decison. Next you have to pick a service
and do some configuring.
The easiest place to start is with a free service that offers to host your blog directly on its own server. This choice eliminates the cost barrier to getting started, and the hassle of setting up an FTP connection with an ISP, which is even more daunting to web novices. (An ISP is a service that hosts web pages for you, usually for a fee, and FTP is the means by which you copy files over the internet from one machine to another.)
Once you have a blog, posting to it can be as easy as typing in a box, as illustrated here for blogger.com, and then clicking on a button that says something like post. You will soon want to do more, like uploading pictures to include in your entries or icreating hypertext links, but your blogger host will probably help out here as well and if worst comes to worst you can share your frustrations and get answers from fellow bloggers on an electronic bulletin board. For greatest flexibility, a blog author does eventually need to learn some HTML. I recommend Webmonkey for Kids and HTML Goodies to my applied computing students but there are literally hundreds of other tutorials on HTML available on the web. (If you do decide to try out HTML code on your blog, take note that you are already inside what is called a BODY tag and act accordingly. This tip will make more sense, of course, after a tutorial on HTML.)
Starting out for free is a good way to discover whether or not you are really interested in blogging, but I recommend paying up and getting the ad-free version of whatever service you go with as soon as possible. The cost is usually low—about $40 a year—and you can expect better support as well as the confidence that your hosting service is more likely to be stable over the long term. Free services can be solid as rocks, but those tend to be the exception rather than the rule these days.
Blogs come with different features that bear on such things as whether multiple authors are supported, how old entries are handled, and how much help you get with things like images and letting readers make comments. It is also possible to have a private blog viewable only to those in possession of a password.
For a break down on features and sources by a rebutable source, visit the
article Choosing
a Blogging Package for Students by Scott Hacker, hosted on the website
of O'Reilly, a well respected publisher of computing books.
The blogging resource page of the Writers Write website includes links to articles about both the mechanics of blogging, such as locating hosting and indexing services, and topics unique to writers who blog.
Most of all, however, if you are going to do it, have fun.