Getting Personal

A week or so back, I picked up a monthly writer's magazine, one to which I used to subscribe. My subscription lapsed somewhere between babies, but as always happens in the months leading up to my birthday, my "who-the-heck-am-I-now-and-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life" crisis begins, and so I was out scouting mags and realizing I need to resubscribe and try and get things back in gear (which, um, probably also means less blog reading and more writing).

So, I am flipping through the mag, trying to decide if I really want to buy it, and I see a short (and I do mean short) article on blogging. Buy it I must.

When I read the article later at home, I am struck by this section:

"But here's a warning: The quality of the writing in your blog has to be as good as your essays, articles and books. There's a noticeable tendency among bloggers to ramble and produce sream-of-consciousness musings. Your random thoughts and insights may be of interest to you, but few others care."

Wow. Pretty narrow-minded, don't you think? What happened to the entire field of non-fiction writing? Creative non-fiction? Memoir? Personal essay? Susan Howe and Rachel blau DuPlessis are names that jump in my head immediately).

Depending on "what" kind of writing gigs you are hoping your blog will help you land (which is the basic premise of the article), personal information may or may not be appropriate, but in many cases, the blogs we are most drawn to may be precisely ones in which strands of "daily" life are interwoven with other content, the ones which demonstrate a compelling blend of content and a strong personal voice.

I read an assortment of knit blogs, and some of them really are "knitting-only." Others have much more personal content. All bloggers approach the issue of how much to share and how much non-knitting to include differently, and blog readers all respond differently to varying levels of personal information. Some of us like "just-the-facts" blogs, and some of us really are looking for a bit of reality-TV in our blogs.

That's why we see such different lists of "blogs we read" on bloggers' sidebars. Do you look at those? I do. I often randomly follow a link or two in hopes of stumbling upon a blog that really resonates for and with me. I'm always amazed at how many different blog names I see that I've never noticed before. There are thousands of us. It's wonderful, but it's sort of crazy.

It's also sad when a favorite blogger shuts things down. A blogger who was one of my daily reads pulled the plug on her blog this week feeling, according to her final post, like she'd revealed too much at times and feeling she just wasn't interested in talking about knitting any more. It's easy to think we "know" people because of their blogs. We just have to respect the lines people draw and remember that we're privy to what someone posts in a blog entry, but that doesn't necessarily mean we have the right to know, ask, or presume more.

To those of us who continue knitting and blogging and being a part of the ongoing definition and re-definition of what it means to blog, may we continue to turn our daily knitting and non-knitting (when approrpriate) endeavors into good content. May we find interested readers (or may they find us). May we persevere.

Have a good weekend. Back here Monday with, hopefully, some progress on the back of the Must Have.