Are You a Blogger or a Writer?

Bloggers and writers are creatively similar but their habits differ considerably.

If you’re trying to be a blogger, then be a blogger. If you’re trying to be a writer, then be a writer. I think it’s useful to sort the two and decide what you’re trying to be.

The hill of wildflowers vs. a carefully planned garden

Think of a hill of wildflowers vs. a carefully planned garden. Among those wildflowers may be patches of utter beauty. There are flowers here and there that shine among the neighbors, but overall, there is a wildness to it all. That’s the blogging world.

The carefully planned garden allows each variety to shine within its neighborhood, placed in just the right light next to plants of a supporting role. That’s the writing world, with its careful displays in bookshop windows.

Now take a carefully planned garden that looks like a hill of wildflowers — that can be the highest form of written expression, a work of genius, the illusion of wildness but with a supreme deftness of control.

Or that same garden that looks like a hill of wildflowers could be a failed work, something that overshot its mark and just doesn’t work. Such is the subjective nature of judging art. One reader might see genius where another sees slop and failure.

Certainly, you have to know how to write passably well to be a blogger. But not all bloggers are serious writers. And many serious writers don’t blog.

The means of production for blogger and writer

Blogging puts the means of production within the control of the writer. No longer does she have to wait for publishers, editors, copy-editors, assistant copy-editors, and the vast engine of the publishing world to sign off on a piece before it can be published and presented to the world. She can write and post it within an hour if she wants. If she has a good copy-editing eye, it may even be error-free. But a post, successful or not, begins and stops with the blogger.

For the writer, there is a heavy lift to publication. Draft after draft, followed by acceptance, copy-editing, cover, and dust jacket design, typography, galley proofs, and printing while publishers gather reviews for dust jackets. A manuscript flows through many hands over many months. And just because a piece of writing goes through a bevy of editors and copy-editors doesn’t mean it will be error-free. Published books may contain many errors, some grammatical, some typographical, some factual.

Your relationship with your audience

With blogging, you generally have a more direct relationship with your audience, often using 2nd person “you” to speak directly to them, as I do to you (Well, hello there, you lovely reader). This immediate interaction with an audience is one of the benefits of blogging. You get instant feedback, knowing that your work is being read, that you aren’t just sending electronic bits and bytes into the ether sphere to land in the deep dark of space.

Sales may indicate a readership for the published writer. Just because people buy books doesn’t mean they read them. Many people stop reading partway through. A single book may generate several readers per book as people pass books around. There isn’t as direct a connection between the published writer and her audience. But between readings, book store signings, and sales, publishers can gauge an audience size for a writer.

The art of writing vs. the craft of blogging

Writing has a level of art to it that blogging doesn’t usually have. A sense of style, use of figurative language and metaphor, of extended argument over lengthy developed paragraphs. Let’s just take a look at one particular difference between blogging and writing — finding the best word possible.

So many blog posts I read use words that are near misses. They aren’t the right word, let alone the best word. The words are serviceable and get the job done. It’s close enough. Blogging is quick and dirty, an oil change, whereas editing for the more traditional writer is a luxury 112-point maintenance check.

There’s a story about James Joyce, the genius author of Ulysses. David Lodge writes, “There is a story well known to all students of Joyce, that one day in Zurich when he was writing Ulysses, he met his friend Frank Budgen in the street and told him he had been working all day and had produced two sentences. “You have been seeking the right words?” asked Budgen. “No,” replied Joyce, “I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentences I have.” So not only do you have to find the right word, you have to put those words in the best order.

In John McPhee’s book, Draft № 4 — On the Writing Process, he discusses trying to find “le mot juste,” the right or exact word, what Gustave Flaubert claimed he was trying to find when walking around in his garden. For his own students, McPhee puts a box around “any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity. While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word?”

Now take a moment to think about this point. Writing doesn’t come out right the first time, whether blogging or writing. It takes revising and editing to make it better than when it first came out. Sanding wood to make it smooth so it can take a varnish. Shaping clay to make a dish. Soldering metal to make a cookie-cutter. Letting the dough rise or bread baked in the oven without disturbing it. Making tangible things takes skill and expertise, but most of all, it takes patience. And it requires polish.

Patience here doesn’t mean waiting. Patience means actively pursuing excellence, taking time to find the best word . . .

the best word the perfect word the precise word the right word the correct word the most beautiful word the beautiful word the prettiest word the most scintillating word the most exhilarating word

Which word is right? For the most part, the blogger doesn’t really care. The writer does.

This kind of lingering, of pursuing precision in writing, maybe at odds with what you know about writing as a blogger. Why find the exact word when so many words will do? Time is money. Let’s get writing. Let’s get posting. Let’s meet that quota of 1 or 2 or 3 posts per day.

(I haven’t even talked about structure. A blog post is highly structured, dependent upon its purpose, right down to title, subtitle, subheadings, picture, short paragraphs, non-academic and non-legalese simple language. Published writing has a thicker style, fuller paragraphs, arguments developed over pages and chapters, and vocabulary that probably sends you to the dictionary. This isn’t even to consider the academic publishing juggernaut, textbooks and science books, and the like. We could probably spend an entire post talking about the structure of blog posts.)

There are a great many bloggers who I read with the kind of attention I reserve for more artistic writing. They are sensitive to words and meanings, and they don’t waste my time as a reader. But there are just as many bloggers who I read and end up skimming, wondering how they made it out of freshman English. The level of care is negligible. Why should I care about their writing if they don’t care about their own?

Of course, the blogger must have a rudimentary knowledge of writing. There is room in this world for both kinds of writers, traditional writers, and bloggers. I think bloggers can learn a lot from traditional writers, and I think any writer who wants to blog may find that being a blogger is more artful and demanding and requires a different toolset and writing habits than most traditional writers have.

Maybe this is an argument about the elitism of the publishing world vs. the democratic principles of blogging. Blogging as well as self-publishing (another topic, entirely) opens up writing to everyone, regardless of quality, while the publishing world still maintains some control over what kind of quality writing sees print and who gets published. Of course, publishers aren’t just about the quality of writing. They’re in business and want marketable writing. I’m sure there are thousands of quality manuscripts in drawers throughout the world that are filled with quality writing but neglected to find a market that a publisher was willing to take a chance on.

So who are you — a reader, a traditional writer, or a blogger?

Lee G. Hornbrook taught college English for 25 years and is at work on a memoir. Connect with him on Twitter, his personal blog A Word, Please, or his Medium publication The Writing Prof.