Writing and blogging

So I haven’t been blogging much in the past few weeks because I’ve been spending a lot of time writing instead. (One of my books, A Teaching Subject, is now out of print and I am trying to prepare some notes for a possible reissue.)

What I find interesting is that writing and blogging feel like such different activities. Writing is work—even if it often seems work of a peculiarly intangible sort. I spend a lot of time moving phrases and words around, re-checking texts I need to cite, fiddling with the 500 words or so I wrote yesterday. (I’m not really sure if that counts as a new 500 words for the day or not.) My wife goes off to work and comes back with news about who she’s met and what she’s done. My daughter goes to work and comes back with the same. The dogs lie around the house and ask to go for a walk. Meanwhile, I move words around—slowly—on the computer screen.

In contrast, blogging feels like a pleasure I allow myself—a diversion from writing. The words come pretty quickly; there’s a kind of immediate thrill to publishing a new post that makes the task of composing manageable and fun. I try hard, that is, not to let blogging turn into “writing.” And yet the odd thing is—I blog about pretty much the same sort of things that I write about, and I don’t think the tone of my blog differs that much from my academic prose.

The stakes are different, of course. There’s a pressure to get things right in an academic piece, while something more like a need to be interesting in a blog post. And there’s a difference, I think, in the texture or density of the writing. I rarely discuss more than a single text on the blog, while my academic writing often feels more like a  kind of stage-managing of a complicated conversation between several authors and texts.

This is not a cry for help. For me at least, there seems use for both sorts of writing. I never kept a diary or journal; perhaps blogging is my version of that. But I also take pride in the texture and craft of my more formal writing. I just really wish I could do it faster.