The writer seems constrained, but not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the [blog] is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must [blogs] be like this?
Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and no upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest of catastrophe in the accepted style.... We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.
I forget where, but I vaguely remember someone writing something calling Virginia Woolf the patron saint of bloggers. I'm not a big fan of her novels (or of any modern novels, really), so I dismissed the person's post. Now that I'm reading some of her essays and critiques of literature, I can understand the connection. If I substitute blog for novel, as I've done in the quote above, it elucidates some of the problems I have with blogging, with how much information to give away, how much I should make my posts like my life, whether to provide comedy and tragedy or mere realism, whether I'm writing for myself or for an audience, little short stories as they are happening or small parts of a whole story, etc....
I just realized that blog posts about blog posts always bore me, so I'll end now.
