Personal Blogging; or, Why I Don't, Really

I haven’t finished marking, but I have finished for the day, and I’ve missed my blog. I’ve been thinking more the last couple of days about the actual process of writing that this blog entails; it has been my most intensive writing outlet since I submitted the thesis, and since I make my living by both writing and teaching writing, I feel it’s only sensible to think about my writing as well.

The best way to think about my writing is to write about my writing.

Plus, I read an article today that made me think a little about what I do on this blog.

I came across this article on personal blogging today, written by Emily Gould for The New York Times Magazine. I knew nothing about Emily Gould except that she was the former co-editor of Gawker (which I don’t read, although I do obsessively read one of Gawker Media’s publications, Defamer) and I now know she has her own Wikipedia page, although it’s largely concerned with the media backlash against Gawker’s Stalker Map.

I came across the piece, as is the way of the Internet, through a series of links. I found it linked to on the blog 2amSomewhere, which I don’t read regularly. But I have nipped on to it occasionally, because its author is a regular commenter on a blog I do read with some degree of regularity, Drunken Housewife. (To make the process more complicated, I came across Drunken Housewife originally via the forums at Etiquette Hell, where I’d been innocently lurking, hoping that the stories on the main page would soon be updated.)

But the process is actually a telling one, because the sites in question are all intensely personal in nature. Etiquette Hell is sometimes embarrassingly personal; any site with a strong focus on etiquette sometimes raises issues that I feel I shouldn’t be made aware of—at least not where they concern complete strangers. Drunken Housewife does have a strong slant towards reading and politics, but focuses heavily on day-to-day life.

And 2amSomewhere—as I rapidly became aware, reading the specific post in which the author linked to the Gould article—is an anonymous personal blog. That’s not a form with which I’m familiar, since I chose not to blog anonymously myself. It seems that writing anonymously about deeply personal experiences might be an extraordinarily liberating experience—but it’s not one that I could see myself either seeking or enjoying.

Of course, I’m not always terribly discreet in the flesh, either, especially after a couple of drinks, so it’s questionable whether there’d be much personal information that I haven’t already brought up at parties. That might make the blog a bit dull.

But there’s also the question of creating and fiercely protecting anonymity.

That’s also not something that attracts me. It must be inordinately time consuming; the author of 2amSomewhere notes in that entry that even his wife is unaware of his blog. But I rather like being read by people who know me. There’s nothing horrific, or painful, or unpleasant, or heartbreaking in my life, nothing that would prompt me to treat this blog as though it were a therapist’s couch or a confessional.

One disadvantage—though not one that has a great deal of weight with me—does arise from my not blogging anonymously, and that’s my refusal to talk specifically about my teaching on here. I give an enormous amount of my time and energy to my teaching, and I love it—nothing but the writing process (when it’s going well) is capable of giving me the euphoric feeling that a really good tutorial or lecture creates. It seems somehow unnatural to omit from this blog something that is so central to my professional and personal lives. But I consciously chose not to mention my teaching in any but the most oblique terms on here, and I don’t regret that decision.

But I do have to acknowledge that this is a personal blog. I didn’t start it with that intention, and I don’t, even now, think of it as a personal blog.

In fact, if I were to count the entries in each category, I would hope that the personal entries would be outweighed by the pieces on reading and writing.

But, let’s face it: Nick is the starring character on this blog, and that makes it personal. It’s only one aspect of the blog, but it’s there.

And that’s because Nick is hilarious: everyone knows this, but not everyone gets to spend as much time with him as I do. So broadcasting the “Strange Conversations” on the blog is a public service, really.

But, long before I came across Gould’s article or started thinking about just how personal some personal blogs are, I’d realised that I couldn’t just assume that my everyday life with Nick was there to be mined for material.

I couldn’t assume that I had that level of control over the blog.

Now, the blog is mine—that’s irrefutable. I’m the only person who posts here and, after an early incident in which Nick (as the site’s designer) moderated one of his own comments, I’m also the only person who moderates the site (except when I was live-blogging Eurovision). The latter role, though, is not entirely or even primarily about control: I just thoroughly enjoy checking to see if people have commented on the blog, and I feel a bit cheated if I can’t moderate the comments. (There’s not a great deal of power in the role, anyway, since I’ve never deleted a comment from the blog in the four months I’ve been keeping it, except by request.)

But when it comes to content, I know that I can’t just assume myself free to blog something if it involves Nick. And, while he’s normally more than happy to make regular appearances on here, he has vetoed—on rare occasions—my blogging certain conversations, mostly because he feels they make him look too silly.

And that’s fine. It gives the blog a co-operative feeling that I rather enjoy. It ensures that Nick and I should never find ourselves embroiled in the kind of argument that Gould describes on the first page of her article. And it means that the blog never becomes a threat.

I do sometimes say, as in this conversation about the remote control, “Right, I’m putting that on the blog!”

But it’s not a threat if Nick knows both that he has the power of veto over his role on the blog and that I’ll respect his decision to veto something.

I may make that something the subject of an anecdote at a party, but that’s not really the same thing.

At least not if he’s not in earshot.