I watched the movie Julie and Julia this week. Julie was discovered as a writer through her blog; a journalist at the New York Times read it, ran a story about her, and immediately she had dozens of calls from book publishers. Cool.
No one will ever discover me through this blog because it's not search-able online. New Ange is in the middle: slightly less personal than a private diary, but too personal for me to make available to everyone. Whenever I think of making my blog accessible to Google, I think: Do I want the guy I dated in high school to read this? Do I want distant relatives who still call me 'Angie' to gossip about my hangup and crises? Do I want personal information about my kids floating around cyberspace for their future employers (and therapists) to see? And I answer, no.
What I write here is for friends and friends-of-friends; to encourage you in your own daily "blah," "ak!" or "ahhh!"
Sometimes I think of starting another blog, one I'd be comfortable letting the whole world read. Blogging more would help the creativity to flow more freely. (Right now I'm at a slow drip.) But would I write any different? Maybe I'm just afraid; after all, if I wrote a book, fiction or biography, its cardboard covers would hold personal information about me for everybody's ex-boyfriends to read. The difference is that it wouldn't be just me talking; a publisher's stamp of approval would be on my words--so the distant cousins wouldn't be able to gossip about my hangups without first mentioning my success: "Did you hear Angie wrote a book?"
I want to lose myself in a book--my book--more than anything; I won't be truly alive until I feel the creativity pour out of me. Is blogging for the whole world the best way to get there? What would my public blog/book be about?
2 comments:
That's certainly one way you could do it! Or you could do it the old-fashioned way, "secretly" and steadily until it's cooked long enough to let into the public....
I find a blank document intimidating, but seem to have no trouble filling up a blog form, which makes me wonder whether I should do all my work here! I always thought that if you put your ideas on the web, no one would publish them because they were already public and available free of charge, but recently I've seen a number of blogs (including your) in print.
Annie Dillard tells writers not to "save" ideas for a better place, because the more you write, the more new ideas you'll get--I need to follow her advice! But I keep getting stuck, and when I do, I'm never sure whether I'm writing the wrong story (or the wrong genre), or writing the right story the wrong way.
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