Does Blogging Preventing Writers from Writing Novels?

A few weeks ago Sarah Hepola shut down her blog, due largely to her argument on Slate.com that it was preventing her from actually getting any “real” writing done.

This struck home because I have always considered myself a “writer” of some sort, though I truly don’t have very much to show for it at my ripe old age of nearly 35.

But yet I’m still “writing” and writing quite a lot these days. I write email at work and home fairly often. I write witty comments on IM and IRC that amuse me (and no one else) all day at work. But even though I’m regularly engaging in the act of “writing” I find myself without anything real to show for it.

I have exactly zero novels, zero television scripts, zero plays and pretty much zero income to show for my writing efforts during the third of a century I’ve been on this planet. I have a few short stories in a drawer (never published anywhere), a stack of yellowing newspaper columns from my college days and a bunch of rambling and sometimes slightly amusing electronic blog entries which don’t even exist in any sort of “physical” format unless someone out there hates trees enough to be printing this stuff out.

I also have 150 pages of a novel that I stopped writing about the same time I started blogging.

Why is that?

Because writing a novel is hard work. There’s an old joke that all accomplished writers have clean refrigerators because the act of writing is so miserable that writers will do everything else they have to do, including cleaning out the refrigerator, before sitting down to write.

Physically, the act of writing anything is always about the same. Whether I’m writing a blog entry or a novel, I’m still sitting down at keyboard, banging away at a bunch of plastic keys. One could argue that different parts of my brain are being used, I suppose. When I’m writing a blog entry or an email there usually isn’t nearly as much “editing” going on than when I work on a novel.

So why, then, is it so easy to write a hundred blog entries and so hard to write a novel? The answer, I think, is two-fold.

First, there’s the size of the project. It’s easier to make a meal for one person than to make a meal for 500 people. A meal for one person may take 30 minutes, a meal for 500 people could take 30 hours. It’s a simple matter of scope. Smaller projects are easier to finish, and as a result, often easier to start. I think nothing of spending 20 minutes writing an email to a friend, but I rarely sit down and try to dedicate just 20 minutes to writing part of a novel.

Second, there’s the expectation of feedback. Not every email or blog entry I write receives a reply or comment. That’s okay, because there’s still the “chance” of receiving some sort of validation that what I’ve written is good, bad or wrong. With a novel, or any longer piece of writing, I need to continually write a very long time to ever really receive any constructive criticism. Often, the work has to be completely done before receiving any comments. So if I write 1000 words every day for month on a blog, I have the potential of receiving comments 30 times. If I write 1000 words a day on a novel my potential for receiving comments is probably about zilch because I’d likely want to finish the novel before presenting it to anyone. It should be noted, however, the the social and potential fiscal “payback” of finishing and actually publishing a novel is probably more than that of writing a thousand blog entries.

And why is feedback or comments important to me? Because I’m a writer that writes to be read. Not all writers do. I write because I want other people to read and appreciate my ideas and thoughts. Sharing writing makes the act of writing much less lonely, and more of a “social” activity. The Internet, and the idea of blogging, takes this to a new high, where your words can immediately be read by millions of people as soon as you write them. It’s the ultimate in social writing. Your writing can be read by nearly the entire world instantaneously.

Would I rather write something that can quickly be read by the entire world, or would I rather sit and labor over something for months (years!) in the hopes of someone, somewhere eventually reading it?

There isn’t really much of a choice when it’s put that way.

Sarah Hepola shut down her blog because she felt her writing blog entries was standing in the way of her writing a novel. And, to some extent, that may be true. Time dedicated to one task cannot easily be dedicated to another task. But for me, shutting down this blog in the hopes it spurring me on to continue novel writing is not very appealing nor very realistic.

I once wrote a blog other than this one and I chose to shut it down. Did I spend all my free time working on a novel? Of course not. I simply found other things to do. I filled my time with video games, television, reading novels that I hadn’t written, working on the house, drinking, making a baby and the gazillion other things people do when they’re not writing a novel or a blog.

Ideally, I think the blogger who wants to write a novel should try to strike a balance between blogging (short term project with immediate feedback) and writing a novel (long term project with long term feedback). Is it easy to do? No, of course not. Is it possible? Of course it is…

So to answer the question in the title of this blog entry: No, I don’t think so.

I don’t think that the mere act of writing a blog precludes you or me or anyone else from also writing a novel. Does blogging time take away from novel-writing time? Probably. But so does just about everything else in life. In fact, the immediate feedback of a blog may encourage the timid writer to continue working and even give him or her practice in stringing words together on the glowing screen…

Am I working on my own novel again, now that I’ve mentioned it in this blog? Maybe… But you see, I just bought this new video game and my wife is four months pregnant and the house really needs to be fixed up and I really need to start exercising more and, well… my refrigerator is simply a mess at the moment.