How Blogging Affected My Writing – Part 2

The other day, I wrote about how Nelson Algren played a crucial role (unwittingly) in my abrupt transition from aesthete to communicator. Here’s the promised continuation–several specific examples of how blogging has affected my fiction writing:

• More acute awareness of the reader. This is the master concept. All the bullet points that follow proceed from it. And that’s natural enough: blogging is all about the reader. The reader is its be-all and end-all. The old reader-be-damned, art for art’s sake attitude of the modernist author still has a place among literary fiction writers, and it’s not a good thing.

Nor was it ever. Unlike music or painting, fiction uses a medium developed specifically for communication. Words don’t exist “for arts sake.” Language came into existence to communicate meaning. Blogging exemplifies this perfectly: it’s pure communication. As a blogger, my struggle to communicate clearly and with impact has only heightened my appreciation for the same need in fiction. No matter how pretty the words of praise, when readers stop reading, a piece of fiction, is worse than dead–it does not exist. In fact, it’s only when I hear someone say they “couldn’t stop reading” that I feel good about the job I’ve done.

• Reader-centered paragraphs. Since blogging, I’ve become more mindful about guiding the reader through each paragraph. Blog readers are demanding. Let them get lost or bored and they’re gone. As a blogger I take extra care to write with clear arcs of intent and well honed lines of thought. Any paragraph of mine that doesn’t deliver, or isn’t a clear self-expression of its reason for being, gets rewritten or dumped…

• Constant awareness of value. I try to build in periodic reminders of what the story is all about. In a blog, every paragraph had better contain an implicit reason for reading it– or the reader is gone. I now write fiction under the same assumption: that the readers need a good reason to keep going forward.

• “Argument”- structure in paragraphs, scenes. When a new scene opens in a new place, I make it a point to “argue” for the location, the mood, the rationale for action. That way I build credibility image by image, thought by thought, as if I were supporting an assertion with proof points. This is rarely is overt; the reader shouldn’t be aware of it. But it keeps me on track and maintains hold on the reader’s attention by revealing the story’s inner logic, in a pursasive way.

• Clarity – brevity. Blogging places a high value on brevity. Simple sentences are preferred–and they should illuminate rather than obscure or confuse the reality. Nothing left to chance. Nothing needlessly repeated. When I first tried fiction I went for long sentences with lots of parenthetical material nested in them. I still write a long sentence when it seems right, but I take extra care to see that it’s clear and easy to read.

• Reason to believe – and keep believing. Bloggers are natural skeptics. They need reasons to overcome the mind’s natural barrier to believing anthing you hear. The fiction reader’s attitude isn’t so much “convince me” as it is “convince me PLEASE.” More forgiving, yes, but eventually, without good reasons to believe, even the readers you had “hooked” will fall off the bus, and once that happens…it’s the the death sentence for your story.

• Let it go. A blog post is like a daily news column. Once you upload it, it’s gone. Throughout my early writing life, I suffered from “perfectionism.” Blogging helps relieve that sense of the crucial hanging on every word because it simply won’t tolerate perfectionism. Even now–this very moment–I’m rushing to get this post finished and uploaded, and that’s just the way it is. No time for reluctant genius; you produce, or move aside.

Tagged as: author, blogging, Fiction Writing, modernist, Nelson Algren, writer