Blogging as a Vocation
Alyssa Rosenberg on being a writer:
My experience has been, as Daniel Strauss says, that people become artists, or in the case of journalists, artisans (I wish that term hadn’t fallen into disuse. It lends a level of precision to the space between the novel and the corporate report.) because they can’t stop doing whatever it is they love: write, paint, sing, compose, act, etc. And I think that inability to stop comes from a match between talent and desire. I write much better than I draw, paint or collage, despite the classes I’ve taken in the latter disciplines, and I keep writing because it’s the way I’m best capable of expressing the ideas and capturing some of the beauty I was, um, less than capable of capturing through art.
When I first read that, I thought “yeah, that’s right.” Then I thought the better of it. Certainly I know some people who are basically professional writers but who actually hate writing. What they love is the reporting—calling people, finding stuff out, getting the story. When it comes time to actually put pixel to monitor, they find themselves full of anxiety. But maybe that’s just another way of saying the same thing; that a compulsive need to do the thing is still the driving force, but it’s just not a compulsive need to write.
But certainly for the high-volume blogger, I just don’t see how you could succeed unless you had a maniacal urge to write. And that’s something I’ve always had. Before I owned an air card, half of my train or bus trips to and from New York would inevitably result in me starting a novel of some sort. Not because I want to write a novel, but just because it seemed inconceivable to sit for that long with a laptop in my bad without writing something. Before there were blogs, I was always writing in a journal and apparently my grandfather did the same thing for decades. Consequently, I find it to be a great privilege to have a job where I can just write all the time, about all kinds of stuff, more-or-less at random. For me writing-as-such has always been a necessary activity, and trying to find constructive venues in which to do it a bit problematic. The blog solves the problem.
18 Responses to “Blogging as a Vocation”
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July 24th, 2009 at 11:35 am
The best part about blogging as a vocation is that no one has to proofread your copy.
July 24th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I have a horror of writing, actually. When I go into libraries and bookstores, I get panic attacks. Words, words, words. When we took our daughter to her college we went into the library and wandered through the stacks. There were, as usual for a college, large sections devoted to Medieval and early Renaissance books. Huge books that must have cost a relative fortune to produce. And there they set. Unopened for hundreds of years. All that effort. All that thought. Pure worm food. Aieeeeee!!!
July 24th, 2009 at 11:40 am
For me, the reason blogging became my logical vocation wasn’t so much that I had a compulsive need to write. Instead, I found myself with a compulsion towards spending my time reading news and blogs. Becoming a professional writer/blogger was a way of turning my other compulsion into something productive.
July 24th, 2009 at 11:42 am
it seemed inconceivable to sit for that long with a laptop in my bad without writing something
Too bad your compulsive need to write isn’t accompanied by a compulsive need to proofread.
We kid because we love…
July 24th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Am I the only one who is tired of bloggers bloviating about the challenges and joys of blogging for a living?
July 24th, 2009 at 11:51 am
How many great novels has the world lost because you discovered blogging?
July 24th, 2009 at 11:54 am
I really liked this post because I too, enjoy the act of writing on almost any subject. I also enjoy insights into Matt’s personal character.
I should be a professional blogger I suppose, but I would have to find someone to pay me to do it. As it is, I tend to fire one-off rants on a blogger account because I don’t really have the time to spend creating something really good. Having only a personal blog leaves me accountable to no one but my very, very small readership. While Matt clearly doesn’t have anyone editing his stuff, he is at least accountable to a large readership, which I think helps filter out some of his lesser ideas and makes this one of my favorite blogs.
July 24th, 2009 at 11:56 am
@2 Jeffrey Davis: “All that effort. All that thought. Pure worm food.”
Indeed.
As for you Matt, you are a lucky man. You are doing what you love, and you can keep on doing it into your dotage.
Me, I like to drink and whore. But the older I get the tougher it becomes. Soon, I suspect, it will become impossible.
July 24th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Matt, the people you know are probably more properly called journalists. The absolute vast majority of professional writers are not journalists, and there is absolutely nothing rewarding about what they write.
I worked for about six years as a professional writer in the non-fun fields. I wrote insurance textbooks and educational materials and then later, software documentation. There is no joy in putting together a test prep guide for an exam on actuarial math. None whatsoever. And that was probably one of my more enjoyable tasks.
For the majority of professional writers, their work is mind crushingly boring and is on subjects they care absolutely nothing about. Sure, there may be some satisfaction of a job well done in the end, but there is just no comparison to blogging or writing article for the New Yorker or novel writing.
It is a field that pays incredible poorly and that receives very little respect. Lots of people who are not writers think they can write, when writing for public consumption is a finely developed professional skill. Sure, everyone knows the alphabet and can type. But by the same token everyone can draw smiley faces, but most people realize that graphic design and drawing are specializations.
Having majored in creative writing in college (and grad school) I thought a professional writing gig would be a natural fit. Never was I more happy than when I left that profession behind.
July 24th, 2009 at 11:59 am
And yet this post barely need proofing: “laptop in my bad” is the only tyop. Curious.
Writing is relatively easy. Compulsive writing, for those with the bug, is very easy. Writing well is usually the hard part: you can be a prolific and felicitous scribbler like Christopher Hitchens, who I’d guess barely requires a copyedit, and still be a shallow writer.
How many great novels has the world lost because you discovered blogging?
How many great editors have starved?
July 24th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
And I think that inability to stop comes from a match between talent and desire.
OK, this ranks pretty closely to the stupidest thing I’ve read this week, and it’s been a big week for stupid.
No, sadly, peoples’ desires and talent don’t always match up. On the one hand, it’s kinda cute that Alyssa and Matt think their writing talent so obviously matches their desire to write, on the other hand it’s just standard egocentric BS that one would have hoped they were a little embarrassed to post. I mean, by this standard, I guess Steven Ben Deste was the greatest writer of all time, wasn’t he?
You know pro bloggers are hitting the big-time when they start matching pro journalists for self-important bloviating.
July 24th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
you can be a prolific and felicitous scribbler like Christopher Hitchens, who I’d guess barely requires a copyedit, and still be a shallow writer.
OT: In my opinion, Hitchens’ criticism and historical writing is solid and entertaining–it’s his poorly reasoned, pretentious political bloviation that makes him so obnoxious.
Obviously, “what one writes about” and “how one writes” are not completely inseparable, but CH has a long record of showing that he can “write well.”
July 24th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
“Laptop in My Bad” could be the title of Matt’s second book, or first band.
July 24th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
James Gary: point taken. Though when you can knock out 1,500 print-ready words from the top of your head — a combination of talent and force of habit — then it can be a little too easy to come up with something both elegant and insubstantial.
The capacity to avoid over-writing, and a judicious use of the blue pencil treatment — or be willingness to let others do it for you — is what separates writing much from writing well.
July 24th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
pseudonymous in nc Says:
July 24th, 2009 at 11:59 am
And yet this post barely need proofing: “laptop in my bad” is the only tyop. Curious.
============================================================
Tyop!! Very good!
July 24th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Tyop!! Very good!
Also notice the conjugation of “need.”
Be very, very careful when you snark about spelling and grammar on the internets.
July 25th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I think this misses what can be a very powerful impetus for the professional writer–or, rather, the person who wants to be a professional writer. What I’m talking about is the love not of writing but of reading. For me, as for a lot of writers, writing is hard, painful, and typically anxiety-provoking work. (Jack Hitt on this is sadly accurate.) Then why do it? Because somewhere along the way writing–good writing, great writing–became the locus of admiration for the person. More than it, it became a source of … oh, I don’t know, spiritual fulfillment. In a less lofty vein, it’s like the aspiring filmmaker who spends his childhood obsessing over the beauty of, say, Kubrick films. Or Bergman. Or Mayazaki. Or whomever. So he decides: I want to do that! But does he know how? He doesn’t know if he knows how. But he knows he LOVES movies. So he decides to give it a shot. And he finds it’s really, really hard. And a lot of it is grueling, and not much fun at all. It’s much more enjoyable to have made a movie than to make a movie. But he persists, because still there is that boyish love of movies. And because there persists that boyish love of movies, that faith, the very act of making movies, however painful, persists in being meaningful. Just the way praying for someone like St. Teresa was awful, painful, distressing, panic-stricken work. But there was that love of God, so she joined up, and you do what you have to do because of that love for God. And then, every once in a while, in between the gnashing of teeth and the sweating and the panicking, there’s … joy. Pure, amazing, stratospheric joy. And that makes it all seem worth. It might not be, but it seems like it.
It’s very difficult to explain to people, especially people who love you, and have to spend a lot of time, maybe their whole lives, why you write if you are actively distressed by it most of the time. This is because those skeptics are right: it’s stupid to do something you don’t like a lot of the time. But it’s what you do. What can you do? The impulse remains.
July 25th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
J. Hitt on this, forgotten in last comment: http://ideas.theatlantic.com/2009/07/interview_with_jack_hitt_part_ii.php
Boiled down, this is pretty much like something that I think Henry James said, which I think was, “The writer is the person who has more difficulty writing than other people.”