In the past I did study writing and I ended up doing performance poetry for a while. At some point I stopped writing and I always said I’d stopped doing it. Thing is that recently I have realised this was wrong. I for some reason thought of blogging as not writing. I don’t mean it wasn’t valid. When your writing has always been under the label creative in the sense of poetry and to a lesser extent stories, you see blogging as maybe not under that banner. Well, this was what happened to me.
I find it a bit funny now thinking that was my conclusion. I don’t feel that way anymore. Partially through reading other people’s blogs and partly from some recent writing I’ve done on this blog. I realised that blogging is in itself another form of creative writing. If you think of creative writing as an art form then a good blog can be art. There are blogs that I feel touch something inside, where the blogger reaches out and grabs some part of your essence in the things they write. I love those blogs. It needn’t be some great earth shattering analysis. Blogs are often about the little things. That is also one reason I like them.
There is an art to writing a blog. i definitely am not saying that mine is an art form and won’t be pointing you to any here to show good or bad art. One thing I learnt from being an art student before I took software, was that art is so subjective you can’t expect the same feelings on it. Blogging touches people in different ways. It is also a different medium from blog to blog. Some use it to report. to teach, to vent, to figure out things - blogs all have different motivations like art. They use different techniques, different tools, different ways to write whatever they are intended for. Like art they all look different and are a matter of taste visually along with stylistically.
There is one thing that realising this has given me back. I guess I was getting a little jaded by the whole blogging world. I hadn’t gone off it - I have a feeling I never will. Blogs just were for me an accepted part and I wasn’t really feeling the passion so much anymore. It was still their but the full energy wasn’t. With starting to look at blogs like art I have recharged batteries about blogging. I am looking at them in a different light now no matter what their context is. it’s odd when you can look at a blog about CSS and think of it as an art form - it’s also sort of freeing. Appreciating the small things in the art form has always been a passion for me. Blogging really should be recognised not just as the age old ‘online journal’ or ‘ designers only’ resource where bloggers are all either reporting, teaching or saying what cute thing their dog did today. I don’t know if there is a course for blogging - I can see that being a popular one at University. Is this part of blogging growing up? Is this the natural evolution of blogging to become an art form?
I have always thought of blogging as writing, and I apply the things I have learned in all my writing classes to my work. I think it makes a big difference :)