Recording Life in Real Time
About a year ago, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I had spent months agonizing about the state of my career in the IT industry while I sat at work, utterly bored. I was convinced that I had chosen the wrong career and I needed to get out.

I didn’t have any delusions that I could become the next Hemingway. I would be perfectly happy as a staff writer for a magazine, penning a column or two for some websites, and publishing a book every few years. It was all very simple. I just wanted to be able to make a living doing something that I enjoyed, instead of sitting at a desk, doing someone else’s idea of productive work, and punching a clock to get paid.

Once I came to this conclusion, I did some research on the writer’s life. I bought copies of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. I read articles and talked to acquaintances that majored in English about their luck in becoming professional writers (“You wanna be a writer? You’d better be good.”). Everything I read or heard told me that to become a good writer, I should practice every day, like a basketball player shooting free throws or a shortstop taking grounders. The amount of practice prescribed by these experts varied, but all agreed that an aspiring writer should set aside a certain amount of time each day to work at the craft. Knock out a thousand words. Spend an hour revising a piece. Describe a scene from the morning commute. I’m a methodical, schedule-oriented person in the first place, so I took this advice to heart and set out to become a “real” writer.

At the same time I discovered blogging. Creating a good weblog demands a certain amount of dedication. A blogger should post on a regular basis and put some thought into the writing. He should check spelling and grammar, and make sure the post is somewhat coherent. But blogs don’t demand lengthy prose or in-depth analysis of issues. A well-crafted introduction to a hyperlink or a colorful anecdote is usually good enough to please the average reader.

I had already been running my own website for quite some time, and blogging seemed to be the perfect way for me to turn my site into a new writing practice field. If I was going to be writing things for the web every day, then naturally that would be the dedication that every writing sage recommended.

I loved working on my new blog. I spent hours reworking the design of my old site, and I carefully crafted new entries every day. Friends who had been reading my old website loved the new concept, giving me incentive to keep going. I had an audience. I was satisfying the part of me that needed a creative outlet, and I convinced myself that I was well on my way to becoming a writer.

I kept at it for a while. But after months of faithfully posting on my blog, I started to wonder how much my writing had really improved. I spent most of my time thinking up witty posts for next day. I wrote longer features every now and then to give my site some variety, but the longer I was blogging, the harder time I had bringing a full piece to completion. I constantly fought the urge to wrap up my thoughts in one snappy sentence or to link to some article by a professional journalist that expressed my viewpoint fully. I could feel my attention span shortening, and with it the desire to work on any piece longer than 100 words.

Nature of Blogging
The nature of blogging incites this kind of attention deficit disorder on the web. Most blogs fall somewhere between an online diary, personal soapbox, and link directory. Occasionally bloggers will focus on specific topics, but usually the posts are as varied and diverse as the people who create them. Readers gravitate to blogs to take guided tours of the web and peer into the minds of strangers. Naturally, when one starts their own blog, they follow this same formula to please the voyeurs and news junkies of the Internet.

In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott talks about compulsively taking notes of everything she sees or hears in her daily activities. She carries index cards with her everywhere she goes and says that, “If I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple words to remind me of it.” Sometimes she has time to expand one of these moments into a full-length scene. Other times she just scribbles a few words to jog her memory. But she never stops observing and recording for fear of forgetting something. “That is one of the worst feelings I can think of, to have had a wonderful moment or insight or vision or phrase, to know you had it, and then to lose it. So now I use index cards.” She squirrels them all away in hopes that she can use these memories in her art someday.

I started writing this piece with the intention of proving that blogs do not make people better writers. I was prepared to prove how they turn people into scatterbrained navel-gazers, whining about every little injustice in their lives. But as I tried to prove this, I realized my theory didn’t hold water.

Blogging is the equivalent of Lamott’s index cards, except that we bloggers take our notes online. We describe happenings in our daily lives. We point out injustice and laugh at fools. We wonder out loud about The Meaning of It All. Most of what we write will never turn into a full-length novel or essay, but taken together our blog entries comprise the snippets of life that fuel such “professional” writing. Blogging surpasses our private notebook scribbling in that it provides an immediate audience. Even our most inane dribbling on the web gets immediate feedback, good or bad, and provokes us to do better.

I now realize that being a “real” writer involves much more than having the right job description or a published article. It’s about having the right mind set. It will be a long time before I can quit my day job and write full-time, if ever. But until then I am a writer whether I ever make a dime from my work or not. I practice every day and I am proud of my work. I let the world see some of it on my blog, and I keep some of it to myself.

My problem with motivation was not a side effect of blogging, but rather a failure to unplug myself slightly and look at my daily work as a whole. I certainly haven’t reached any of my goals as a writer, but my writing has improved by leaps and bounds over the past year. I used to struggle to find the words to describe scenes. I stared at the blank screen fishing for ways to prove a point. But now I can start typing immediately. By forcing myself to sit down at the keyboard every day and write something, anything for my blog, I was jotting down those little notes to myself to remember the funny, interesting, maddening, and beautiful things in real life that make our real writing better.

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Matt Wood is a collaborator and contributing blogger for webraw.com. He also spends his time writing and blogging at his site wood-tang.com.

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