« Forward-looking retrospection | Main | Ballet en travesti »

January 04, 2005

The reluctant blogger

Back home and back to work: The copy-edited manuscript of my memoir greeted my first morning at the “office” (AKA my living room). I’ve spent the day checking over blue-penciled fixes by an anonymous reader with comfortingly bubbly handwriting. It’s not such an anxiety-inducing task. The marks are light—a comma here, a sharp-eyed catch of mistaken chronology there. Six years of journalism work might not make you a great writer, but they will make you a grammatically clean one.

Still the ways in which re-reading the manuscript does worry me have got me to contemplating the nature of autobiographical writing, and this website. You might think the copyediting process would rouse concerns over what I reveal in the book, about myself and others. “The Lost Night” is after all a true story about an unsolved murder, and friends and family will learn a smidge more than they ever cared to know about, for instance, my past sex life. (Disclaimer: It’s awfully tame, in case you’re titillated). But those hesitations only flicker across my mind. Far more persistent is the fear that I will forever miss the opportunity to axe a glaring cliché or cut a deadwood description, that the book will come out less than perfect (as, inevitably, it will). Mood colors everything: Some days I think I should rewrite the entire first half; on others I say to myself, “Go figure, this is good stuff.”

So I’m not hesitant to share unflattering details about myself, at least not in hardback. Yet posting on this website—so much less exposing—still feels like such an unnatural and worrisome process. I didn’t come to blogging freely; my husband, a political blog addict, insisted I should do it and found the designer for this site. The blog has proven useful: It aggregates my freelance work and gives me an online calling card. But I’ve never truly taken to it. Not for me the casually confidential working diary of a Terry Teachout or the biting, devil-may-care running commentary of an Old Hag. Every time I type an entry I have to think “Is this interesting to anyone but me? Does it tell too much about me? Too little?” and worst of all, “Why am I doing this?” And usually the true answer is because I think I should. As for why I think I should, I’ll leave the further psychologizing to the therapist’s office.

Why the reticence online when I’m so unguarded in my memoir? I blame the conversational nature of blogging. I’m not shy, but I’m not a chatty person. I can fake outgoingness at a party for about as long as it takes to greet the hostess, and by forty-five minutes I’m trying to nudge my husband toward the door. I detest talking about myself except with known friends, or even talking about my opinions, and if pressed to make small talk at a social gathering, I usually end up interviewing others. Writing has always been different. In writing a memoir or a novel, I’m not forcing myself upon anyone; no one has to nod along with fake interest. If I work hard enough on a page, someone may want to read it. If I fail to engage them, they can put it down. It’s true with dance criticism, too. I don’t force anyone to buy the Chronicle or finish my latest dance review.

Of course I don’t force anyone to read this website, but the presumption of conversation still hangs heavy. Blogging is like holding forth at a salon. The role does not come naturally to me, and so day after day I scan the other blogs (when my insecurity can withstand it), and wonder why I can’t sally onward with such entertaining confidence, and thank God that every other kind of writing still feels safe. The irony is that in contemplating why I’m reluctant to post to this website, I’ve done so at greater candor and length than ever. Is this a breakthrough to freer self-expression? A surrender to self-indulgence? All I know today is that the printed pages of my marked-up manuscript beckon me like a warm bed in wintertime.

Posted by Rachel at January 4, 2005 01:56 PM

Comments

Post a comment