John Zeitler

Essay Week 2010 runs from Sunday, July 25th to Saturday, July 31st. Every year I take a week and write about some topics of interest to me that run slightly more serious than the usual fare on the blog. That’s not to say that games and anime won’t enter into it, but the predominant theme is that this week skews a bit more literary than epistolary. Today’s essay goes into what I do on this here blog.

Recently I’ve had occasion to take stock of what I do with myself online, and while for the most part I tend towards a ‘read-only’ view of the majority of the web, this blog and its predecessor, along with the Linguankery project, are where the majority of my effort and output winds up. The question has been posed to me in several different ways, but it all comes down to the same thing in the end: Why exactly do I feel the need to write a blog?

As with everything, the answer is a little complex. First, of course, is the fact that I’ve been told many times, and feedback has confirmed, that I’m a good writer. I’m also quite confident of this fact without the validation of others, in point of fact; so much so that I’d written two full novel drafts before the Linguankery project ran, just to see if I could. I’m not perfect, and I suppose I’m far from being able to quit my day job, but I know my way around words.

The second is that I like to be able to keep a record of what’s going on in my life, and I also think that it’s of interest to some people. Now, granted, some random jerk off the street isn’t going to be reading this blog to get a deep insight into what I had for breakfast (it was cereal, if you must know). However, my family, both immediate and extended, do read, and are interested in how I’m doing. That’s the primary reasoning behind my desire to have daily updates. More to the point, on occasion I’ll stumble upon some bit of interest to a wider audience, and sometimes I talk about pointless stuff. It evens out, really.

The thing is, though, when people ask “why do you write a blog?”, they’re not asking that question. The real question that they want to ask, but in most cases aren’t willing to outright say, is “why are you making this information public?”. This also carries with it the implicit remark, “Nobody will care about this, nobody will notice, and it’s not like you’re writing anything big or important. Don’t you have better things to do with your time?” It certainly is a question worth considering.

The thing is, though, for reasons I’ve stated above, people do care. Even if it’s just a convenient way to reach a whole bunch of family members at once, or if maybe the topic at hand really is just interesting to two or three people in the entire world. The thing about the internet is that, no matter what you write, the odds are good that someone out there will read it, and that someone will be interested.

As to the quality of the writing– something I freely admit has been highly variable on this blog– that’s a stylistic matter, honestly. I like to think that when I write a blog post, or a forum comment, it’s giving me a bit more practice in the rapidly-fading art of true literacy. I’m firmly of the belief that being literate in this day and age means being able to write as well as if not better than being able to read, and that the shortcuts we take in communication will inevitably harm us. I don’t care for chatspeak, I try not to unironically use obsequious SMS abbreviations, and even in instant messages I strive to write in full, complete sentences. It makes me a slower communicator, of course, but I think it also makes a big difference.

Writing of any kind is an important practice to learn, to cultivate, and to maintain. It disheartens me when I hear of budget cuts to a school, but I see red whenever I hear of cuts to literature and arts programs. A student goes to school not to be indoctrinated with a regimen of essential facts and knowledge, nor to be given a broad but shallow pool of initialization in various fields to pick which one he or she is most suited to. The purpose of education in an enlightened, democratic society is to give the student the tools and skills needed to enable them to express themselves to their fullest potential, regardless of their ultimate path in life. Key among these skills is the ability to clearly communicate, because that opens the door to all other learning.

However, like anything, writing, and writing well, can be forgotten as time wears on without exercising it. How many of you could honestly sit down and write a book report these days? How many of you even think it’s an activity worth undertaking? Writing doesn’t just exercise our vocabulary, it acclimates us into a higher level of critical thinking. It’s easy to absorb words and to understand them, but to bend those words to your will to clearly express an amorphous idea in your head takes more than just passive mental acuity. Word games like crosswords, Word Ace, and the like fall somewhere in between this: good stopgaps, but ultimately no replacement for the act and art of crafting a written work.

There is another element to writing, one which I indulge in more often than some others. When I am not writing for this blog, or jotting a forum post down, I am doing creative writing– novel-writing. Fiction is an interesting and nebulous area to consider when discussing the merits of writing, and as it turns out the advent of the internet has put the spotlight on a form of creative writing that tends to get a lot of undue disrespect: fan-fiction. (For those unfamiliar with the term, this is when a person writes a story using characters, settings, or other elements from a popular and well-known (usually) commercial work, such as Star Wars or Final Fantasy. I’ll get into the immediate concern in a moment.)

Fan-fiction, and indeed most fan-created works, tend to be viewed with exceptional disdain by the internet at large, mostly due to the fact that, like everything, it conforms to Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of it, if not a slightly higher percentage, is utter unreadable dreck. I served as a submissions reviewer for a fairly well-known news site that had a fan-fiction section, and if I had to go by the entries I read, I’d skew that number closer to 95% (and yes, that certainly includes my own work). The thing is, though, in the minority that isn’t god-awful, one can see the beginnings of some truly great authors. Either in plot, characterization, or merely capturing a particular prose style, some tales out there are quite amazing. I’ve always said, and I still maintain, that fan-fiction is the best way to develop creative writing skills and to discover plots you never even knew you wanted to write.

Where fan-fiction becomes a liability is primarily in its legality. Strictly speaking, any fan-fiction is a violation of copyright, as the author is taking elements from a work he or she did not create. In the vast majority of cases, since the derivative, tributary work is being produced not for profit, the producer of the original work is either willing or compelled to turn a blind eye to the derivatives, mostly due to the accepted standards of fair use. If the derivative work is deliberately damaging to the original– such as misrepresenting the themes of the original to provoke a reaction, or using the characters to lend an artificial endorsement to a damaging or hateful point of view– or if the derivative work is being produced for profit, the company does have a legal basis for reprisal. But, like I said, for the most part, original creators tend to ignore or even encourage fan-works. Some fairly prolific authors began by writing fan works, even if those works never see the light of day, and could never be used to give a new author exposure or pre-publication credit.

There is, of course, another liability to fan-fiction, and that is complacency. Most fan-fiction authors do not ‘graduate’ to wholly original fiction. This is sometimes due to a self-imposed feeling of inadequacy: “I’ll never be able to write characters from whole cloth, and why should I when I have all of commercial fiction to draw upon?” and so on. I don’t think, inherently, it’s a bad thing to limit one’s writing to fan-works, particularly if one genuinely doesn’t feel a need to become a professional writer. But I do think that everyone should at least try. And I mean, make a real effort at it. Sit down and bang out a fifty thousand word pile of crap. It may wind up being better than you think possible.

What it all really boils down to in the end– the question of why I write– is that it’s a hobby of mine, just like following sports or collecting cars. People have spent their lives doing stranger things; and while it could cynically be seen as self-absorption, I would think that a blog can’t be so easily dismissed by those outside its intended audience, regardless of who that audience is. In an age where all information is kept, all information has value to someone, on a long enough timeline.