the greycat blog

Rachel Toor, a US professor of creative writing, has written a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the difficulties (a rather tame word) of writing. It’s a great piece of writing in its own right, and it rings very true, at least for this reader and writer. This paragraph caught my eye:

It’s a daunting thing - to believe that you have something to say (that others will want to hear); to convey information in a way that is pellucid and intriguing; to find the mot juste, to avoid the tired and the clichéd; to create scaffolding to support the ideas you are juggling; and then to have the confidence to put it out there in the world, where it will surely be picked apart, kicked around, and perhaps even trampled.

It is very daunting, which I suppose is one of the reasons blogs were invented. For most bloggers only the last point applies.

This train of thought leads me to wonder which great writers of the past would have relished the blog as a form of expression, even of literary art. I’m sure Charles Dickens would have loved to blog. Anthony Burgess would have filled pages every day with every topic under the sun. Perhaps Jane Austen would have run hers as a society gossip column. I can see Virginia Woolf, her blog an elegant exemplar of minimalist design, tapping away each day at a new stream-of-consciousness entry. Émile Zola would have run several angry political blogs, I suspect. And Henry James, dictating to a drooping keyboard amanuensis, would have gone tirelessly on, and on, and on…