writer blogs

Well, it seems I was wrong. All author blogs are not in fact written by science fiction/fantasy writers or by people who started out writing online. I discovered two this past week via Pamie's blog: the very successful Meg Cabot of Princess Diaries fame and Caren Lissner, a newcomer whose first novel,Carrie Pilby, comes highly recommended.

I must admit, Cabot's site has mostly persuaded me that I'm too old to be her demographic (not a slam, just a fact -- she's good but I'm not her audience) but I'm a bit in love with Lissner's. Anyone who starts the first several weeks of her blog writing the same exact phrase every single day ("Woke up, put clothes on, went to work.") has a wonderfully dry sense of humor. And when she quotes a friend who wrote in to ask her to put more stuff in her blog, she answers: "No." Heh. Fortunately, though the beginning of her blog was a great piece of performance art, she has gradually included more snippets and bits over the months so it's now a site worth return visits. And honestly? That gimmick got me intrigued enough to do exactly what it was intended to: I'm going to buy her book and read it.

Both Lissner and Cabot say the same thing about their blog writing, though. Cabot said in her December 28th entry (no permalink, sorry) that she was discussing with Susan Juby (another non-sf writer with a blog!) how difficult it is to maintain a blog if you're a fiction writer

Because if you’re a novelist AND a blogger, you’re always like, “Well, that funny thing that happened to me would make a great blog. But it would also make a great scene in a book.” So you’re always, “Do I blog about it? Or put it in a book?” You can’t use it for BOTH (although I know probably will, though I swear not on purpose).

And Lissner says (in her 7/27/03 entry) that:

The reason I don't do a full-fledged blog is that I'm doing too much other creative writing I don't want to take away from, and if I have an idea I want to use in a future book, I don't want to spoil it by putting it in more raw form here. But I may sometimes want to talk here anyway.

I know the feeling. When I was writing screenplays, this was no big deal. I was hardly about to insert a scene from my own life into my scripts, they were always larger than life. But now -- well, my current novel is far from my life (me, a trapeze artist? Not quite), but my stories are closer. Much closer. And who knows what my next novel will be? (Actually, I do know, and yes, it bears some passing resemblance to people I've met at least once or twice.) But that won't stop me from writing snippets of real life here. I like to believe I have more stories in me than that. But something does hold me back from writing more full autobiography in this space. I'm with Caren Lissner on this; I don't want to take away from my other creative writing. I never found personal essays took anything from my screenwriting, but they do tap into the same back-of-my-brain awake-dreaming source as my prose fiction. So yes, I think it's possible to blog and I hope blog enjoyably, but yet hold something back for the other work.

Interesting to consider.

Posted by Tamar at January 12, 2004 09:29 PM