The other day, I said something about the tonne of dull and tedious tripe that gets published everyday on hundreds of blogs all over the web.
It’s not that I feel I need to read it all. It’s just that I get so despondent, flicking through my daily feed for something that might fire me up, excite me, make me think.
Let’s get physical – I’m not pulling any punches
I’ve come to the conclusion, as an artist, that taking in the bulk of what is written on the web is about as useful to my craft as junk food is to David Beckham. This week I’m on a strict health regime, to raise my game–back to DH Lawrence for my leisure reads. And hang the rest.
It seems I’m not the only one who’s feeling a bit jaded about the state of the modern blog:
The blog format has devolved. Once a simple gateway to self-publishing, today the blog format is responsible for a thousand tawdry blogs: hideous half-breeds of tabloid and blog built around odeous content, cluttered site designs, and optimised for pageviews alone.
Rock on, Nick. Now there’s a fellow Brit I can get in line with.
It’s not a ‘Tribe’ mentality, it’s a herd
The problem for most bloggers is simple. They’ve become confused about their purpose. They don’t know what they’re trying to do, and so they’re copying everybody else.
They’re getting blinded by the shimmer and glitz of clever widgets and fancy templates, with clouds of comments and social media links, filling up the weighty spaces of their empty, expectant sidebars. A strange and overpowering urge to add meaning or distraction. As if their own words aren’t enough to hold a reader’s generous attention.
If you don’t have a love for the medium, then what the hell are you doing here?
Let’s be clear about this: the medium is writing. It’s not blogging. The act of keeping a weblog is just the mode of delivery for the stuff, the words, the art. Blogging itself is not an art. And when a thousand blogs became tutorials for the purpose of blogging-as-a-business, that was the moment that blogging got dull and boring and tired and tedious.
Perhaps it’s too much to ask for all bloggers to adopt a purity of purpose about their work. Some people just want to keep an online chit-chat going, a public ‘Dear Diary’ experience mixed with confessionals and personal heart-to-hearts.
That’s ok, if you’ve got the time to spare to read and share, but I don’t. And even if that is your sole purpose for turning up at the page, you’d do all your readers a favour by getting more conscious and committed to the art of writing itself.
I’ll finish off with some sensible advice
Someone helped me out along my writer’s journey by asking me a very valuable question once, which was this: Why do you write?
This little question has become the True North on my writer’s compass now. If I can’t answer it clearly to myself, I know something’s wrong.
If I’m writing for popularity, it just ain’t going to work. If I’m writing from obligation because someone said I should post every day (or three times a week, or whatever), that ain’t going to work either. And If I’m writing to try to prove something to the world, my parents, myself — that definitely isn’t going to work.
Why do I write?
I write to be a better writer. I write to feed my artist soul because it needs the energy, the flow, of doing work it lives and breathes to do. I write to better hone my craft, to get my subject across.
Those answers are enough for now and will keep me heading in the right direction, even if I don’t always know where I’m going. Because this life is all about the journey, not the destination.
And you?
You can’t answer this question in the comments because I’ve turned them off. I’m really not interested in the clap-on-the-back experience or the mutual admiration brigade that many bloggers seem to cultivate and perpetuate.
If you want to respond to what I’ve said, do the sensible thing and either send me an email through the contact form, or write your own post with a trackback or link to this one. I always welcome feedback and new ideas.
