I hate to burst the bubble of any romantic would-be writers of stories, but… your main character? Make him a plumber, private eye or professional accountant. A pimp, pirate or professor of English. Anything but a writer. According to a panelist at a prose convention, “People don’t give a (blank) about writers.”
Trust me, your story will still be just as good if your hero is a piano player at Madam Pompadour’s. What I am saying is, dear reader, it is OK if you flip to some other page now… as I will proceed to talk about my favourite writer, Me.
Me, because after 25 posts on my new blog I feel entitled to cast a writerly eye down my blog trail.
Looking back, do I know what I’m doing? Not quite, not yet. Off in cyberspace there drifts a blog with my name on it, now discontinued, where for “My 500th Post,” I said I was off to try something different. Trying for a “new, improved, exciting, delicious” website. Still trying. At least I’ve made a few “very good” pieces, if I do say so myself—but I won’t say which ones.
I wonder: “Have I made it new?” and “What do I want?” Don’t ask me what my readers want— I say “don’t ask” because I can’t answer yet: So far, no meaningful reader statistics or reader comments for me to bend towards. Just as well, as I would still like to experiment a little more.
As for new, in a week or two I may experiment with a “conduit post” which is what most blogs used to be, remember? Where the value is in the links, not the writing. My preference is a “destination post” where value is the product on the page. Back during the heyday of blogs, a man I respect said he won’t read any post that does not have a lot of blue links. Not me. I wonder whether he still follows that philosophy?
Another experiment: A few weeks back I did a “gleaning post” with the links pushed down into the footnotes, where I gleaned a few quotes from a few people on a single topic. I don’t know of any other such blog posts, so that’s a new one on me.
Another innovation: I posted a sequence of comments of mine, that I had put on someone else’s blog, (among 127 comments) comments now jazzed up and improved—I’ve never seen that done before. How amusing, to say with elegance, now, thoughts I had only stammered, impromptu, back then. (For Kill the Artist, Burn the Bread)
An original: I am doing “letters” as essays, being “letters to Derek Sivers.” And I’ve done one post of (fiction plus “a list,”) which may not be original, as I would assume other serious bloggers have included fiction too.
I’ve devised an (essay plus poem) structure; I’ve posted a few. Maybe it’s an obvious structure, but nevertheless I haven’t come across any others. Rudyard Kipling would present every short story with a poem tacked on above the opening line: I suppose once you learn to express yourself through poetry you just can’t hold back. Hence when I persuaded my campus newspaper editor to include a two page spread of articles by students from the Disabled Students Club, I told my practical no-nonsense editor: “Listen, you have to allow some of the pieces to be poems.” Because poetry helps the hurting heart.
Some people, when they have something to express, will naturally use poetry or dance. Seriously. I have been at a community centre, on more than one night, when nobody minded when someone stood and “said her piece” through dance.
Of course poems, such as sonnets, benefit from having rules. My prime rule for my blog is this: Nothing over 900 words. A rule that serves my readers well.
My poems are serious, but my one fiction post I called “light,” a modest codeword meaning “hoping to be funny,” and I’ve done the odd light essay too. I suppose I could go further in that direction. Here’s a light clip from Pooh’s poem in praise of Piglet:
“Courage,” he said, “There’s always hope,
I need a thinnish piece of rope,
Or if there isn’t any bring,
A thickish piece of string.”
—Robin, the Boy Wonder, interjects, “Holy red snapper, Batman! Sean is approaching 800 words already!” Well. Better quit while I’m ahead, and go drink in the bar, perhaps to sip on a clear glass of margarita, one with sodium (Na) around the rim. See you next week,
Same blog time,
Same blog station,
… as a file of sodium atoms precede me into the bar: “Look! It’s— Na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Blogman!
…
…
Sean Crawford
West of the new city of Chestermere (six years old)
October 2020
