One of the things I like about blogging is that you can say things pretty much straight out of your head. What you the reader gets is a straight transcript of the dialogue that is continually going on in my brain. This is how I think, how my thinking sounds. It's me. I'm not putting on a posh voice or airs or graces or anything. The stuff I write on my blog is accentless, natural and (fairly) spontaneous. It's about as true to the real me as you can get.
When I sit down to "write" on the other hand my language immediately changes, as do my thought processes. I become more formal, more literary. I guess I've been conditioned by all those books I've read over the years. I have a preconceived idea of what a book should sound like. As a result I feel like I'm writing in a straitjacket.
One consequence is that my "writerly" prose is stilted, conventional and dull. As is my literary imagination - I've even learned to think in a certain constipated, "literary" way when I sit down to write my novel. This isn't a problem with blogging. Jesus, if anything it's the other way round.
Hopefully, what might happen one day is that the two styles will gradually fuse and I'll get the best of both worlds whatever I'm writing.
Fusion writing. Is it a style? A genre? Or just a load of bollocks?
'Finding your voice' is the absolute key, you're right. Maybe you should try to write for an audience? Us, if that works for the blog ...
ReplyDeleteThough from what I've seen, I can't imagine you sounding stilted and dull ...
You didn't lose it in the first place Pund. It is there and it's only your head that gets in the way.
ReplyDeleteDisengage the brain, let the heart take over and write a 100,000 word blog post!