Open Letter to Blog Meta Cheerleaders
It's odd, writing here - I'm not sure if I'll bother to move old blogger entries to the new system, once it's running, and so at the moment I'm just throwing my words onto a cold, ugly wasteland to see if they'll limp home again. They don't even have a comment box, the poor dears.
But such tender, writerly feelings are a sign of weakness. If I'm not careful I'll end up a liberal arts major serving fries at McDonald's, and not gibbering about stress tensors at all, which is Not A Proper Direction for my promising young career. Really, I was going to poke at a certain hypersensitivity common among the blog meta-cheerleading set, which is well exemplified by this thing Vaughn wrote. It's a frightfully inconsequential subject, but this is a frightfully inconsequential web site so it all works out in the end.
Before getting my knickers all in a twist, let me expose some biases. I happen to believe that a good writing style can be taught. Truly great writing springs from the impenetrable depths of the soul, yeah, fine, whatever - but good, functional writing can and should be taught. Furthermore, I don't think that learning the basic principles of good writing can kill your muse or stifle your creative freedom or turn you into a zombie clone with no voice. As Smoky the Blog says, only you can turn yourself into a zombie clone with no voice. So when I read the offending article, I nodded along in basic agreement. That's where this is coming from.
Now then. If I'm going to twist my knickers, I'll have to make use of little quoted excerpts. Here's the first one, earning double bonus points for quoting a quote:
"Amateurs are writing as they�ve always written. Self-consciousness, self-doubt, awkwardness, and overcompensation are perennial hallmarks of the beginning writer. The reason today�s amateurs seem more profoundly un�profound could be a simple matter of exposure. There used to be impenetrable gatekeepers. Now, CNN roundtables, documentaries, independent films, MTV, and the web - which has no gatekeepers in most countries - are broadcasting every poorly crafted phrase and half�cooked idea imaginable."
Unbelievable. It's a long time since I heard such unmitigated snobbery. There's too much "exposure", apparently. Amateur writers should not be seen or heard until they've perfected their craft - even on the internet, which is supposed to be the great democracy where everyone can get their words online. Pardon me for breathing, in that case.
This is something I've seen before: first, some poor schmuck mentions that with the Internet, people can publish work that doesn't meet the old print-industry standard. Nowhere does said schmuck say that people publishing sub-standard crap are perpetrating crimes against Art and Humanity, or that this extra new exposure is a bad thing at all, but soon he or she is being ripped to pieces anyway for failing to spend the next two paragraphs railing against the restrictive standards of the old publishing industry, or having the audacity to judge the quality of anyone's writing at all, or any of a thousand other offenses. But one can say that most people are shitty writers, and mean it, without wanting to kill them all and let literature re-evolve from the roaches. One can even say that most weblogs are shitty, and that it would be nice if there were more non-shitty ones, without wanting all the shitty ones to go away - it's not like anyone's eyeballs are glued to the screen after all. And sometimes, for a lack of space or sheer laziness, one can forget to mention the last bit about not hating everything. So for the love of Elvis stop tacking such ridiculous conclusions onto every little bit of criticism you come across, it makes you all look like American foreign policy or perhaps Ariel Sharon. Yuck.
I won't debate the usefulness of grammar, or experimenting with other writers' devices to see if they fit into your voice. I find both of these things useful at times, but then, I don't care if my writing ends up sounding like every other twat journalist around if I can still use it to communicate my own thoughts and stories. And predictably enough, I've run out of good rantin' steam after the first paragraph, so I won't pick apart much else either. The important part is up there, where I compare people to American foreign policy - aren't I clever?
The other important part is that most pretentious advice-giving snots aren't so pretentious that they waste advice on Mildred's online journal for herself and her cat. Dennis Mahoney was fairly careful to state that his advice was meant for people who already want more traffic, yet big chunks of response are devoted to indignant defense of the myriad other reasons to blog. Uh-huh. He might be arrogant, but that doesn't mean he's talking to you.
Oh, and the other other important part is that just like nobody has to read shitty weblogs, nobody has to read shitty articles on how to write better weblogs, either; and "shitty" is a subjective judgement in both cases. I can post summaries of my breakfast, you can post advice about how to write a better weblog, and we can call it even. Right? Good.
God I feel better now.