Does Blogging make you a better writer?

Excerpts about blogging from writers who blog
"I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age - and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't."  (Andrew Sullivan, writer)

“Writing a blog can be a lot like writing a book; overwhelming at first, in need of structure and flow, and at times very personal. However, a blog is a living, breathing form of writing. Your "story" evolves and changes over days/months/years. You have the ability to connect and interact with your readers. And, the best part, if you missed a grammar error you can go back and correct it!” (Krista Rhea, writer)

A number of editors on staff at Writer's Digest have their own personal blogs and when we started out we were in the exact same place as a lot of you are right now:

 "I am still in the planning stages of my blog. It has been overwhelming to say the least."  (Vicie Moore, writer)

"I'm stuck with my blog. Don't know which direction to go"  (Sharita Gopal, writer)


My take on this
I totally agree with this. Although, I’d been writing most of my life, I actually did not start writing seriously until I began blogging. Blogging forces you to improve your writing skill, work out the kinks in your style of writing, and find your voice. Interacting with comments may help your mode of expression, but seeing your writing in a particular format and reading it back to see if it makes sense is invaluable to a writer.

I probably would not have written my first memoir if it weren't for my blogging. I began writing stories on a writer's site. At the urgency of many many readers on that site, I started organizing them into chapters.  I started having to deal with time lines and transitions (one chapter to the next). Then I found I had to have some sort of story line and plot. to hold them all together. I began studying fictive techniques to enhance the stories. I spent hours learning how to infuse my stories with life. I learned so much about writing during that time.

When I completed the memoir, I let it sit for months. I dug it out one day and was amazed to see how far I had come in my ability to handle large works. I completely re-wrote the manuscript. My writing had improved so much over those years that I started a new memoir using a different, more skilled approach and style. I still intend to publish the first book, but truly believe the second one will be far superior. It's true what successful writers say: "You must write every day and often to improve."


If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment

Not so positive review of Eat, Pray Love

I came across this interesting review of Gilbert's book. It's a different take on the many reviews that have been done so far. It draws into question the author's honesty, in relation to her writing of the book and what she had to do to make it entertaining. In fact, Ms Mertz found it embarrassing.

Traveling for the Book – How Far Must a Writer Go?
A Review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s
EAT, PRAY, LOVE

by Carol Mertz

As is often the case, travel contributes to the making of a book.

Elizabeth Gilbert created Eat, Pray, Love following a lengthy respite from her normal activities as a writer. She traveled to Italy, India and Indonesia and conveniently used the three “I” countries as sub-divisions within her book.

I found this memoir, though it presents more like a novel, outright embarrassing, so much do we learn about aspects of Gilbert’s private life we’d rather not know. Because of her humor and her ability to write with clarity and with what many regard as honesty, she nearly won my respect. In the first part, particularly hilarious, she is nearly undone by Italy’s pasta offerings and within weeks gains about twenty-five pounds. Was this true, or did she as an author, know how to play up her food indulgences for the sake of her book’s structure? This very overindulgence is what draws her so-called honesty into question.

One senses Gilbert worked intensely with her editor, and together they knew just how far she had to go to make the book entertaining. Her subsequent movie deal and the popularity of her book prove she was successful, by today’s cultural standards. (Eat, Pray, Love was released by Columbia Pictures four years after the book’s publication in 2006.) My slanted eye notwithstanding, her writing, to me, is suspect. She’s willing to go to any lengths. Since she portrays herself as one who knows no boundaries in her writing life or in her private life, she appears willing to risk all for the sake of the sale. This ultimately makes her writing contrived and perhaps unworthy, in my judgment.

If we take Gilbert’s self-portrayal at face value, we see a woman with enough financial resources to travel far and long enough to sort through the devastations of her failed marriage and to select a new path, in this case, an initially salacious arrangement with a Brazilian. The relationship may or may not prove to be one of ultimate loyalty.

Many women, I imagine, are shocked by, or envious of, her ability to travel alone. This freedom is not an essential “plot” element of the memoir, but underlies it. It’s easy to assume most women in the throes of divorce would not be emotionally free enough to take off on a trip, or physically free enough to travel with no foreseeable deadline and no urgent financial or familial obligations. Those of us who bear real family allegiances might be justifiably envious.

Gilbert portrays little guilt about her failed marriage and yearns only for freedom and escape from her suffering. Early on, she tells us she has no religious guide in her life except the zen teacher to whom she is introduced in NYC.

The author contrasts each three segments of her book vividly and artfully. Throughout she exercises no restraint in any of the countries she visits and portrays herself as entirely free to follow her inclinations into any pursuit. I find her attempts at meditation in the ashram not entirely plausible, depicted as passionate strivings toward an elusive something. In my view, Eastern meditation practices value detachment over striving.

Gilbert gains twenty-four pounds during her first few weeks in Rome. In India (Pray, part two of the book) she scrubs floors and supposedly does learn how to meditate, with the help of her guru.

In part three she finds her man. And vah-voom! How she and her man click! Again I ask, contrivance?

If Gilbert truly fund-raised among her U.S. friends to provide housing for a poor woman she meets in Indonesia, and if, as is hinted, she used funds from the sale of her book to help this woman, perhaps we can forgive her her exaggerations.

Elizabeth Gilbert Eat, Pray, Love Viking (Penguin Group) New York, NY (2006) ISBN 0-670-03471-1

- Carole Mertz

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment

Blogger Ball #7

Welcome to my book blog. I am a writer, editor, educator, musician, and small business owner. I have been

innkeeping at my bed and breakfast in Louisville KY for the past 17 years.  I am passionate about women's issues, the arts, and life in general...and  I love to blog. I'm working on a memoir now and have been trying to start reading more and reviewing books that appeal to me. I want to get back to reading memoirs again, as I'm in the throes of re-writing mine. Any suggestions for memoirs written by creative, adventurous and strong women will be more than appreciated. I love Ruth Reichl's books. She writes, as I do about people and food, as does Maya Angelou.

I hope you enjoy your visit.

Before you write a memoir: think about this

What the Hell Is Memoir: The Debate Is Ongoing….

a guest post by poet and writer Jenne R, Andrews

You can find Jenne and her insightful posts on her blog: Loquaciously Yours

Today I stumbled across a discussion on a thread in the Memoir Group on She Writes about the difference between memoir and autobiography which necessarily addresses the issue of what memoir is and isn’t. Hope Edelman, author of the best-selling The Possibility of Everything weighed in, ably giving the distinctions and definitions currently– and to me quite unfortunately– in vogue. Here is my reply; please Fed Ex me some band-aids for the fall-out (jra)

“Hope’s comment is germaine in my view: “This is what was once meant by “memoirs” with an S, as in “I’m writing the whole story of my life from the point of age and wisdom I’ve finally achieved.” A memoir is a more artfully rendered narrative that’s informed by memory and the author’s interpretation of events. Emotional truth is often as important, and sometimes even more desirable than factual accuracy. (Don’t shoot me, journalists! But this is true.)” –Hope Edelman.

I do take issue with “This is what was once meant…”– some of us still view “Memoir” this way. With respect to Ms. Edelman’s definition of memoir as an “artfully rendered narrative that’s informed by memory and the author’s interpretation of events” there is an implied assumption that a given narrative is art as opposed to the unadorned journal of catharsis it often is. Regarding the labored construct of ”…artfully rendered narrative informed by memory…” Ms. Edelman’s own memoir, The Possibility of Everything, was penned in the wake of taking her daughter to a purported healer in Mexico. She must mean memory across the spectrum– encompassing very recent memory, that which is recalled in the wake of experience. By that definition everything one writes that is not in the present tense is memoir. ”Factual accuracy” is another problematic phrase; we wouldn’t read memoir if we didn’t think we were reading a true story and a true story depends on fact. ”Emotional truth” cannot possible be truth, as what one lives is experienced subjectively.

In any event, the “memoir” boom set in motion by Mary Karr’s The Liars Club and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes– although a number of wonderful contemporary autobiographical, memoir-ish narratives preceded that book such as Patricia Hampl’s A Romantic Education– has seen a shift in how memoir is defined.

In fact, the word has been hijacked to legitimize a recent– as in the last twenty-five years– sub-genre–if we can even dignify it all by calling it a genre– of personal confession/revelation, much of it by writers younger than those one might traditionally view to possess the sufficient perspective to write “memoir.” Accordingly, I am going to use the phrase “autobiographical narrative” to discuss what others call “memoir” in the remainder of this essay.

Numerous advocates of AN claim, and Ms. Edelman so alludes, that its objective is to locate one’s “personal truth”. I advocate for something more exact than the term “personal truth” to characterize what the best of autobiographical narrative in current favor offers– something along the lines of ”realization”, even “epiphany” that on a good day, resonates with with the reader.

It appears to me that if “truth” finding is the mission, the matter of whether one is creating literature or not falls by the wayside. Further, in permitting ourselves to consume so much pulp nonfiction, we have created a market for it. We have become voyeurs, and we love that window into someone else’s private life– even to climb in the window and rummage through the underwear drawer. If the voyeuristic appetite did not exist, neither would AN.

Another attempt to legitimize autobiographical narrative has come about in the plea for redemptive endings. Understandably agents, editors and critics are tired of reading grueling personal stories that dead-end or in the words of Erin Hosier (She Writes’ resident agent) keep getting worse. ”Where’s the hope?” she writes. Great memoir across the ages has not depended upon a redemptive ending. It has depended upon the quality of the telling of the story.

For a time the phrase “creative nonfiction” was applied to personal narrative and still is as a genre for the M.F.A. But the abandonment of the goal of the creation of a work of art/literature, the sacrifice of the vision for the extraordiness of the ordinary that characterizes art for the temporal reward of a purge, has meant that creative nonfiction has itself descended to the level of autobiographical narrative. In turn there is a further descent into “expose’”– the salty opportunistic and exploitative accounts of someone else’s private life also in favor.

I just finished writing a memoir of a trip I took thirty-seven years ago (Nightfall in Verona, sample chapter here). In the epilogue I say that I could not have written it any earlier– I was too close to the story and some of the things standing in the way of/eclipsing my appreciation of the experience had not yet healed and dissipated. A degree of distance gave me the ability to paint with a full palette, to incarnate the experience in art, I pray.

To me that is the argument for waiting, perhaps writing about something to get it out or make a record, and then putting it away. My most recent piece on life with a mentally ill mother, Notes on a Yellow Rose, posted at Loquaciously Yours, is far more compassionate than my decades earlier numerous published poems about her– most of them bitter, focused on her shortcomings, sent out into the world with the attitude that I had the right to “my truth” and to hell with how she felt mirrored at her worst in the pages of my books. Another strike against most of the AN books in favor; proponents argue that personal truth no matter the cost to others is the goal. Obtaining distance from the subject frees one to focus on craft– the sharp edges of experience have been worn down and time has given experience luminosity— the light cast by the extraordinary.

When I was younger I wrote about many things as a victim, unable to see my part in them and certainly numb to anything redemptive in the people close to me whose business I put in the street for the sake of my literary ego. I contend that many people writing expose’ (trash-personal narrative) about their families, significant others, their addictions and other follies, are committing the same sin not only against others, but against art.

Part and parcel of my viewpoint is that if we all love literature, we need to protect it. We need to protect the genres that define it by protecting the traditions that gave rise to and define that genre. Granted that there is blurring of the lines between genres and the emergence of subgenres, et cetera, I believe in protecting the genre of Memoir by continuing to state that at its best it is written by someone generally viewed to have much to say, or to have been in public life, from the position of looking back a good distance from events.

Unquestionably, thanks to Oprah Winfrey and other book-loving high profile people , there is a growing market for stories of falling down and getting back up– a faux literature of intimacy. In our spiritually impoverished culture there is also a call, as Erin states in her post, for the first person nonfiction story to yield redemption and a take-away. Time will tell whether the plethora of books on the market termed “memoir” – Eat Pray Love, Pillhead, Cherry, Fury, Running with Scissors, The Glass Castle, et al, will endure the test of time to be regarded as literature.


If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment