Talker's Block

Seth Grodin's  column on "Talker's Block" hit home for me today.

He writes:
"No one ever gets talker's block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.
"Why then, is writer's block endemic?"

Writing is a part of my life: I work with a community of writers in my English class.  I belong to a Writers Group.  I have a few friends who have blogs, and lots of people chatter away on Facebook.  This latter category, I believe, plays into this admonition:

"Writer's block isn't hard to cure.
Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better."

He advises that everyone should have a blog or use Tumblr or something on that order and he suggests that the comments should be turned off, because "you don't need more criticism, you need more writing."

I like this column of his.  Every time Writers Group rolls around, I've about convinced myself that it's an idea that has played itself out, that we are a bunch of post-grads trying to act as if we are still in grad school with its combined burst of energy and exhaustion.  Then I go to group, and find out how exhilarating it is to be around those who write and even though none of us seems to be writing every day, we are writing. 

Which is exactly Grodin's point.

Thinking About The Situation

My friend Judy and I discuss on a regular basis life, our students, and how our peers interact with the internet, which is (quite frankly) rarely. As a result, she and I are about the only commenters on each other's blogs outside of family members. I told her my daughter's peers have a different mindset (as does her daughter's) and that this younger generation regularly reads and comments on each other's blogs. Or Facebook pages.

I read a lot of blogs. Some dismiss them as narcissistic, lightweight and completely self-referential. Are they? I'd say no more so than personal essays that are published in the newspapers. (Or poems in various collections.)

But the difference between the published accounts and these "free web" accounts is that critical word: "free." I've thought for some time that the web could be a vehicle for publication of some kind, whether it be this blog-self-publishing version, or whether like Pioneer Woman, a blogger is picked up by the major publishing houses for a book, thereby legitimizing what is written by the act of putting ink to page, money into bank account.

In all cases, the goal is to build an audience. When I was at my writer-friend's home the other night, she had several books that she talked about. One was her friend Holly's book, a softcover book that didn't have enough sales so it didn't merit a contract for a second book. So, Holly's done. In a way. Much the way I felt after hitting 400 posts and the only comment was a "encouraged" comment from my husband, as well as a comment from my friend Judy, mentioned above.

Hitting 400 posts is not the same as batting .400, or hitting 400 balls out of the ballpark, or publishing 400 novels, or 400 personal essays, or raising 400 children, or baking 400 cupcakes. It's viewed as someone just sitting down at their computer and larking around with words, text, photos, illustrations, in other words, not serious writing.

But it is seductive for just that reason: a blogger/writer can mix, match, cull, steal, borrow, video, write, doodle, in short, lark around with all the various types of media that are out there. And it's immediate. And given the writing compulsion of the writer to write, it's easier than wading through publishers, agents, convincing the world out there that supposedly doesn't read, to Please! Notice Me! It's Web 2.o at its finest, and all free.

And if the blogger/writer picks up ads on the side, potentially lucrative. I noticed that Nienie has now opened up her cooking blog and the cynic in me noted that the ads were front and center. Given the proclivities of my generation I don't ever anticipate getting paid for my internet writing. But it's not only ads. Do prizes attract viewers? Do free giveaways bring in the blog numbers? In many cases (mostly those of the under-thirties generation) blogging has become about getting paid for the copy that is put forth into the world. We have come full circle. Does getting paid for maintaining a blog legitimize this endeavor?

Or is ink to paper still the only way for a writer to earn their credentials?

Veritas

The chair on the left, with the red leather cushion is my father's "Harvard chair," with its logo--Veritas (truth). The chair on the right came from my mother's side of the family; it was one of six kitchen table chairs from her mother.

My father and I spent a lot of time in these chairs these past few days editing his memoir. He would sit with his notations on the hard copy, neatly arranged by chapter in two massive D-ring binders. I would sit at the computer, noting on the electronic copy all the changes.

Occasionally I'd cajole him to write more, clarify, amplify, to linger in a scene or to be ruthless and cut cut cut. Some times he'd resist and we'd have a dialogue about what worked, or why the reader needed more, and in the discussion we'd find the compromise we were seeking. It was a lively and exhausting three days with lots of laughter, shared secrets, and active discourse on a variety of subjects related to what we were reading and working on.

Mother was patient with these two hermits in the study, sitting on their chairs, taking a journey.

Whiz Kid on the Block

When I converted to Google Reader it was a heady experience, scrolling with my teensy button on my mouse, zipping through a hundred or more blogs in twenty minutes. I hated it when they stacked up and so learned to click on "Mark All as Read." Wiped away were the numbers, the bold typeface that said, "You aren't finished here."

Then on one of the blogs I follow, The Year in Pictures, the blogger James Danziger wrote a post a titled "Listen Up!" a few weeks back, asking where everyone had gone--where were the comments?

The question is why are people not leaving comments these days? Or maybe the request is: please leave comments whenever you feel even the slightest bit moved to. They are really what keeps a blogger going. I would have thought that this week there would have been more than one comment on the Gursky photo or more than two comments on the amazing Narduzzi picture of the Byblos Art Hotel.

Maybe it's the weather...

In the torrent of comments left at that time a couple of people mentioned the fact that now his blog was in their Google Reader:

I think more and more people are using Google reader for looking at their favorite blogs. To leave a comment you then actually have to make the effort to open the blog itself. Maybe that has something to do with it. Nevertheless, I have been puzzled myself by the lack of comments on your blog. Because it's such a great blog, personal and informative, and very generous. Please keep it up. We're out there.

I've been thinking about this one too, as the comments on this blog seem so few and far between now, yet I hear that people do read and enjoy the writings (or they're polite enough not to comment when it's a droll day).

So I've made a concerted effort to use the Google Reader tool a little more sparingly. I like seeing the blogroll on the side of my OccasionalPiece page, clicking to read someone's blog and being in their world, with their photos and headers and typefaces, rather a driveby reading in an aggregator's world of same type, same style, same abbreviated presence on my electronic page. I also like when I visit other people's pages, seeing what interests them in their Blogrolls and clicking through on a few of their links. More is not always the way to go. Maybe it's my own effort to slow the whole process down, to live in this current time and to interact, internet-style, with one human story at a time.

Lingering on Blogs

I've been thinking about blogging and blogs and Google Reader for a couple of days now. I think it began with a Pico Iyer's article in the New York Times about how he detached from his successful (and I assume high-pressure) job writing for the Times and now lives in a two-room apartment in Japan. He has no internet and so is not tied to the quick life we lead now. He writes:

While I’ve been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or “Walden,” the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. “I call that man rich,” Henry James’s Ralph Touchett observes in “Portrait of a Lady,” “who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.” Living in the future tense never did that for me.

I have long since passed the idea that living like that would suit me. I like walking across the street to visit a neighbor, I like being connected and pursuing connections via the internet; I like my life generally. I say this not to tempt fate (as I knock on wood) or to say that all is nirvana and perfect (it's not) but to acknowledge that I've come to a place where I know where the equilibrium is. And I can tell when things are out of whack more easily than I could at age 30.

While I applaud Iyer's "stepping out" of the rushing river of modern life, or as he put it "living in the future tense," I sometimes wonder about the rivers I find myself stepping across. I've been blogging now for 363 posts, nearly three years. My first post was just a picture of the Disney Concert Hall in LA. I didn't know what else to post. It all seemed so self-conscious, this writing--as my brother-in-law puts it--one's journal on the web. Yet when I heard Trott's talk last night about the lady in England who died of cancer, or the one-pound preemie baby and how is father took a photo of him every day, I realized that like Trott I enjoyed reading other's "journals on the web."

I liked my niece Alice's blog. I still remember many stories she told, and the year we "spent" with her and her new husband in Switzerland. I lingered over many of those tales, adding others' blogs to my blogroll, linking them into my day's reading. Lingered is the key word here.

More about not lingering tomorrow.

On Blogging

I have to give a talk in church this Sunday, so I was trolling TED.com for my subject.

Link leads on to link and I ended up watching this talk by Mena Trott about blogging. I recommend it.



I'll write later about what interested me.

I've been off from school long enough to ask Dave to wipe down the top of the refrigerator, and to discover (when I went to make waffles) that our old waffle iron had died but I hadn't remembered this fact until I'd ransacked the upper cupboard. But I haven't been off long enough to clean out the garage.

Regardless (notice how I used that correctly, although initially I typed "irregardless"), it's time to construct syllabi, Course Calendars, rethink assignments. So I slog through the web, trying to get other English teachers' take on this ancient and brain-sapping process.

I happened on one blog today and read through many sections until finding this one, a short treatise on finding Oneself an adjunct professor with a background and training in Creative Writing, hearing the siren call to write, but never quite getting around to it (like not getting around to cleaning out the garage?). I have no idea who this writer is (her "About Me" is fairly vague and generic and I do understand that helpful cloak of anonymity) but it was a feast to read (all the while, avoiding that Course Calendar writing).

She's been challenged to write her "4x4" or four categories, four items in each by another blog. This is her last category:

spirit (or the deadly sins approach to fueling creativity)

• Envy stirred the other day as I ripped open the Amazon box to pull out the short story collection I'd pre-ordered four months ago, the third book of a woman from my high school class. I'll be checking weekly the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, waiting to see the reviews that will no doubt be glowing (I read one of the stories in a literary magazine; it was wonderful). In addition to this classmate, two of my roommates from graduate school have, by my count, published between them a whopping ten novels.
• The Faculty Without Offices come out of the woodwork for the beginning-of-the-semester meetings, announcing out of strange mouths their familiar-sounding names. Adjunct English, they explain to the full-time faculty at my community college who smile vaguely in their direction. I refuse the title. In my latest experiment I’m trying to let anger fuel my writing, anger at the system and colleagues who face the same under-prepared students semester after semester but, when a new full-time position opens in the department, debate whether they’d prefer a Specialist in Emerging Literatures or a Renaissance Scholar.
• I tell myself that my greed is under control, not for boatloads of money (just enough for books and dental work and, maybe, some new kitchen cabinets) but rather for a secure job that gives me time and energy to write.
• The fear is not of death, exactly, but rather oblivion, the old "Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain" syndrome. In her daily obituary reading, my mother, at 78, marvels at how long people are living these days; at 51, I see the teenagers killed in car accidents and the 4o-year-olds whose families request donations to Hospice in lieu of flowers. Two days ago my mother missed guessing the year of her marriage by a decade; yesterday she asked if the neighbor who'd been the best woman-friend of her adulthood was still alive (she isn't). It's time to write.

It wasn't until I tried to assign a label for this post, that I realized I'd never created one for that thing that haunts me in my teaching and grading, drapes itself on my shoulders throughout my day, and wafts through dreams: Writing.