Quality of Blog Writing Question: What Drives The Voice?
I always feel my students write better when they write just to me, just to their lover, just to their mother, no one else. Otherwise, they tend to write, as we all do, in an automatic voice that feels mass-produced, television-inspired, with none of the hand made qualities one needs when writing on paper. What happens to voice when the writing is on screen, for screen, to stay screened?
I’m thinking about having my spring semester writing students create blogs for their writing instead of or in addition to turning it in to me and their small groups on paper. I wonder: does the blog help you write in your true voice because you have an audience? Or does it make finding and driving down into True Voice even more difficult. With “the vague world” as audience do we tend to write in even broader strokes than usual? Then, I worry about their future employment. Once you put something out there, Amsterdam never gives it back. To make art, they have to be utterly faithful to the truth. Art truth is the exact opposite kind of truth one brings to a job interview. It seems clear: we will always have a dire need for more books.
I took a class this summer with one of my favorite writers, Abigail Thomas, and one of the many great benefits of the stunningly rich course was the reading list she gave us. Anatole Broyard, Jonathan Cott, Lynn Freed. Lynn Freed says in Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home:
“Longing for an audience and therefore guaranteeing none is, perhaps, the great curse of the writer.”
When the subject matter is public property, how do you make it your own? she asks. “I could not find a way to make it my own because it was not my own. And so the stories sank under their own dead weight. The more I tried, the stupider they became. The page will reveal the fake even when the writer is moving herself to tears. ‘Only that which does not teach,’ said Yeats, ‘which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.’”
Next up? The golden orbweaver. I’m not watching television; I’m watching her make metaphors outside my kitchen window. She’s huge!
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