knowing and telling

Writers make good bloggers, but does blogging affect good writing?

- Tom Dolby, Special to The Chronicle
Monday, July 11, 2005

New York -- As a novelist, I love blogs. Though this does not make me particularly unusual, it does place me in the minority of online Americans -- 27 percent, to be exact -- who, according to a poll last year, have ever read a blog. Since my blog affair began, I have often asked myself whether I should, like scores of other writers, add a proper Web log feature to my site, www.TomDolby.com.

I currently have a news page, but it's not a real blog in the sense of running daily musings on the inner life of a writer. My faux-blog -- the guy who designed my site calls it the "Dolblog," a nickname I may formally adopt someday -- is the ultimate in self-aggrandizement, something I am the first to admit. It notes bookstore appearances, mentions in the press, and funny experiences I've had while promoting my novel. It's not like other authors' blogs, in which they reveal their insecurities, their slights, the fact that their partners are angry at them. Through their blogs, many of which are updated daily, these authors are able to grow and cultivate an audience between books.

These blogs -- and there are many, many of them out there, possibly hundreds and thousands of blogs maintained by traditionally published writers -- remove the skin and reveal the skeleton, the guts, of creative life. Unlike previous eras, in which artists divulged such intimate details in their journals, through letters, or in cafes over a glass of wine, they now do it online, writ large on a cyber screen for all the world to see. As with everything else in our society (the omnipotence of reality television, the voracious paparazzi), privacy be damned. Or, to put it more optimistically, as San Francisco literary prognosticator Kevin Smokler notes in the introduction to his recent anthology "Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times," "we live in a culture where we expect the creative to be visible."

The novelist Jennifer Weiner, for example, has an entertaining blog (jenniferweiner.blogspot.com) in which she fills her readers in on everything from the novels she's working on to the television shows she watches to what her toddler ate for lunch. Like Weiner, I am also a devotee of popular culture. I have all sorts of comical daily experiences and observations, and I surf other blogs and have opinions about them as much as any writer does.

Because I don't have a regular column anywhere, and not every reflection about life as Tom Dolby fits into the novel I'm currently writing, often these experiences sit dormant in my journal or in some file on my computer. If I had a blog, they could be out there in the world. They could sing! I could write about my wonderfully eccentric family; I could let my readers know about my recent breakup and re-entry on the dating scene. I could discuss books I've enjoyed and articles I've read. In my most egotistical moments, I imagine that since it's all fascinating to me, it would be of interest to my readers as well. That is, of course, the essence of a personal blog: "I am, therefore I blog."

My first real interaction with the blogosphere began in February; after having been a dedicated blog reader for several years, I did a Virtual Book Tour (www.virtualbooktour.org) to promote the paperback edition of my first novel, "The Trouble Boy." Coordinated by Smokler, 11 different blogs ran content related to my book over the course of one day; the tour reached 50,000 viewers.

As the guest blogger for the brilliant Los Angeles-based literary blog the Elegant Variation (www.elegvar.com), the process was easy and fun. No editors to pitch to! No one to limit the narcissistic ramblings I could foist upon my audience! I posted interviews with my friends, wrote about sending an early draft of my latest manuscript to my agent and linked to articles I thought were provocative. It was all promotional and self-serving, but I also found it strangely therapeutic. Unlike my regular writing routine, in which I have to wait at least a few weeks until something of mine is published, it was immediate; in contrast to working alone at my laptop, I felt connected to a community of others.

When I told my mother about the Virtual Book Tour, she said to me, "You won't start a blog, will you? I wouldn't want you to write anything too personal!" Unfortunately, the jig is already up, and she knows it. As an author who works in a confessional vein, I believe that writing is the art of telling secrets. I find no shame in it; while not all of my work is autobiographical, I have no problem with using some of my life's stories as inspiration. A portion of what I write about in my fiction and nonfiction is material that could also be covered in a blog. Yet were I to start blogging, whatever the benefits might be -- increased visibility for my books, that sense of instant cyberspace gratification -- I'm not certain what the damage would be to my other work.

Imagine, for a moment, if blogs were not a recent phenomenon: Would Philip Roth have blogged about his divorces? Would J.D. Salinger have posted entries about his reluctance to publish again? I was asked recently, "If you're a real writer, do you blog?" Absolutely, if you want to. I think someday bloggers will be recognized, server space permitting, as the great chroniclers of our time, joining serial scribes like Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens, Herb Caen and Armistead Maupin. For unpublished writers, blogging is a fantastic -- arguably, the best -- way to get noticed by an agent or publisher and get a book deal. But I wonder how many published or even unpublished writers would do better to spend less time blogging and more time working on their books.

I'm certainly not the first person to express a dissenting voice about this. When I was in San Francisco recently as a Library Laureate, I spoke with the writer Ayelet Waldman about it. "Don't do it," she said. "Blogging will ruin your life." Several months ago, Waldman wrote about her own experience in Salon, concluding that when she was blogging, "The fertile composting that I count on to generate my fiction was no longer happening."

What Waldman was referring to was the gap -- that is, the time between an event happening and a writer putting it out into the world. For a blogger, it could be five minutes; for a novelist or memoirist, it could be years. As writers, it is critical that we protect that period, that we preserve the burgeoning vitality of our ideas while they are still in their developmental phases. There is an alchemy that takes place in that interval, during which reality turns into art. Bloggers who are also long-form writers risk losing that magic. Offered the rewards of immediacy, they may miss out on the gestational stages between having an experience or idea and its fruition on the page. I am reminded of that famous Grace Paley short story, "Debts," in which the narrator, a writer, says, "There is a long time in me between knowing and telling."

That long time may best be experienced alone. As a novelist, so much of my interior life is already exposed -- when a book of mine is published, I'm giving my readers eight or 12 or 24 hours of myself -- that to give up that essential energy and put it all online would be to spill some of the blood that fuels my work. For now, I want to experience at least part of my world privately, to let my ideas percolate in my imagination before they make their way to the printed page or the screen.

As for the rest of the blogo-sphere, blog away. I've got you bookmarked.

Tom Dolby is the author of the best-selling novel "The Trouble Boy" (Kensington Books). A native San Franciscan, he currently lives in Manhattan and is working on his second novel, set at a New England boarding school. He can be reached at www.tomdolby.com.