Blog rolling

When I get to the bottom
I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and turn
and I go for a ride
Till I get to the bottom and I see you again
Yeah, yeah, yeah
        -- The Beatles, 1968

Day 13 in the NABLOMO world event. The idea is to make a blog entry every day during the month of November. Depending on one’s standards, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

It’s a writers’ thing. Many of us who believe – or want to believe – that we have a novel inside us that would come out of us, if we just apply ourselves, are attracted by otherwise rather silly challenges like this.

The bloggers’ promotion is actually a spin-off of something called NaNoWriMo – “National Novel Writers’ Month.” That event makes a nearly impossible challenge: novelists are required to complete at least 50,000 words in 30 days, pounding out an entire, full-blown novel in a single month.

The blog project was invented last year by a gal who failed to complete her novel-in-November challenge and it being repeated this month. Thousands of bloggers are participating.

Since a blog can be quite short – and can even include mostly information borrowed from other sources – the blog-a-day challenge is far less demanding for most folks than novel-writing.

But the underlying theory is pretty much the same. Most writing teachers and coaches agree that the key to becoming a better writer is to write, write and write. To a certain extent, most argue, improving the quality of one’s writing is less important than developing the discipline necessary to make daily progress and meet deadlines.

Published writers know that writing begins as a solitary effort but usually ends up as a collaboration between the originator and several editors who help make the product better.

Well, no such luck in the blogosphere. Blog entries are typically little more than first drafts. Blogging is a great way to adhere to the “write, write, write” imperative, but the end product seldom rises to professional levels – even when the writer is a professional.

Though I am seeking an audience of critical readers and hope to be presenting fairly clear, concise and if not significant at least somewhat interesting prose, some of my entries are what I once labeled “F.R.O.T.H.” when criticizing students’ work.

The effluent that results from so-called stream-of-consciousness writing – or the product of just sitting down and “pounding out” a story – isn’t really professional writing, as I see it.

Writers should probably really be called RE-writers because the process of editing begins with the writer and, in most cases, takes more time than creating the first draft.

FROTH – writing that flows onto paper “From Right Off The Head” – can be full of energy and promise. Much of a first draft may find its way into the final version unchanged – but much more usually doesn’t bear scrutiny.

There is no shortage of FROTH in these entries of mine. When I revisit some work from past months, I often cringe – realizing that the whole world has had access to unpolished, unedited and often incompletely developed work.

I’ve been asked many times whether I intend to write a book about my adventures. My answer is becoming a more and more emphatic “probably not!” One thing is certain, though, none of these blog entries will make it into such a document without a lot of editing.

This one included.