:: Blog Art ::

I teach writing, among other things. From day one of each course I teach, I emphasize that good writing requires, more than anything else, knowing your audience and being as specific and clear as possible. This last bit means using illustrative examples and polished prose. The first bit requires experience, insight, and intuition. If you lack any or all of those and still want to get a good grade, it requires meeting with your professor and asking, “What audience should I be writing for? What kind of language is appropriate? What counts as credible evidence?” Students who lack the intuition and who refuse to approach their professors often end up with mediocre grades that could have, should have, been better ones. These students assume that writing is this baffling room to which they have been barred access. They consider themselves blacklisted.

Blogging, though, is so wonderfully, oddly, even frustratingly different. Because you don’t know your audience. Or, sometimes you know specific people in your audience (I know that my mom, my sister-in-law, my friend from yoga read what I write here) but not others.

When blogging, you’re writing your own audience. Creating it with each word you type, each image you project, each story you carefully (or not so carefully) craft. It’s such a postmodern-seeming concept it’s almost hard to wrap your head around:

 

Your audience doesn’t exist until you create it. The audience you get is the one you make.

It’s an extremely liberating idea, at first glance. I am allowed to write as if no one’s reading, to adapt a modern-day cliché. I can share things I wouldn’t ever usually share, and hide things I can’t usually hide.

But at the same time, I think very few of us write just for the sake of writing. As a friend of mine who feared that reading my blog was like reading my diary recently wrote, “if you didn't want anyone to read it you wouldn't publish it online.” She is so right. So that leads to the question: if I want an audience, how do I get it?

Sure, in a sense I write my audience, making conscious and unconscious decisions along the way: will I use profanity in my posts? talk about my sex life? my husband? when and how will I use humor? what styles of writing will I use in my posts? will I participate in contests, carnivals, etc.? will my posts usually be long or short? will I use photographs? personal ones? will I link to other blogs and websites, situating myself within a loosely defined community?

But in another real and equally strange sense, I must go find my audience. I have to find the right people – the people who will admire the choices I’ve made along the way, who will like my mix of humor and reflectiveness, who will care what I write – and I have to get them to my blog. Again and again.

My audience doesn’t exist until I create it, and in this case that means not just writing it but going out and finding it. Is this easier or harder than writing through more traditional channels? Is it easier to write a query letter to a major magazine, a local newspaper, or a well-established online zine than to work the web looking for an audience for your work? Maybe yes, maybe no.

But there definitely is something satisfying about going out and getting it yourself. Something very empowering about writing first, addressing audience second. I’m trying to think whether there are parallels and I think there are: painting, poetry, other forms of art whose purpose is expression before economics. I doubt many folks would put bloggers in the same category as they would Picasso, but in a very real way I think that blogging is – or can be – a very high form of personal expression.

Of art.