Is personal blogging dead?

A brief definition is in order: how do we classify a personal blog? Well, obviously it’s one that’s being kept by a person, as opposed to a commercial entity, or on behalf of one – that’s one way of defining it. Another definition would be if it conveys the interests, words, thoughts and sympathies of the writer, in ways that are sincere and uncorrupted by their proximity to the engines of commerce.

The personal blog allows you the time, the space and the means to express your thoughts on anything that interests you or, in my case, it helps to work out what it is I actually think in the first place. Reading other genuinely personal blogs, we get an insight into the world, as viewed through the eyes of someone else, and from the perspective of their part of the world. But the important thing here, I think, is the nature of that person. It must be an ordinary person and, though they may write in such a way as to present the best of themselves, the reader must feel the blog is not a veneer, that it does not present as one thing while being something else entirely, that it is not bullshit or propaganda dropping from the mouths of celebrity.

Ordinary people are much more interesting and informative, and give us a better picture of the world than through our TV screens. To travel a dusty road with a stranger we will likely never meet, to walk a mountain, or a woodland path with them, have them show you things they think are precious, to be shown around their garden,… all the things we can blog about. They inform and deepen the soul, while the shouty, partisan media do nothing but harden it, and make it shallow. That’s why I think the personal blog is a special thing, and I encourage others to take it up, even if they think they have nothing particularly interesting to say.

But is it too late? Is it dead?

I feel the obvious answer is no, since I’m still clearly doing it. If I need further evidence, I need only look at my reading list, and I see others are still doing it too. So no, personal blogging is not dead. Is it dying, though? Well, that’s another question. My own blog, which goes back to 2008, tells me the number of visitors peaked in 2014 and has been declining ever since. If mine was one of those blogs driven by the need to grow an audience, it’s clearly failed, since I had fewer visitors in 2020 than I did in 2012. I’m guessing this decline will level out at some point but, yes, interest does seem to be declining year-on-year, which does indeed suggest at least my little blog is dying on its feet.

This could be due to my having grown a reputation for having nothing worth saying, of course. Or I’m wrong and no one is interested in the trivia of ordinary strangers, such as I have presented here over the years. Or, it could be the way personal blogs are handled now by the algorithms, that they are being out-gamed by the marketing blogs, muscling their way up the rankings. Or, it could be that many writers started out thinking they might be discovered as geniuses and offered publishing deals, or newspaper columns, but have now quit the field in their droves, disappointed at being so cruelly ignored. So the question is now: are fewer people writing, and reading personal blogs? Or are we writers writing the same as we always have, but are just becoming harder for readers to find?

When I ask this question of the Google-bot, the conversation immediately and rather unhelpfully veers away from personal blogging, and starts talking about marketing blogs, or how to monetise your personal blog by turning yourself into a lifestyle-blogging fiction of yourself, and by endorsing products. That kind of thing does seem to be on the rise, at least judging by the number popping up and sticking “follows” on my own blog. But is this really the only reason my blog is on the wane?

You could say the reasons are complex, and they probably are, but I like to think of it as a consolidation. The personal blog is an unusual type of social media. It is long-form personal journalism that attracts a small group of readers who are interested in the thoughts of others. It is telling the world as we see it through “our” eyes, it seeks to inform, to entertain, to tell a story about the world. Through my eyes, the world is a dauntingly complex place, but it is also endlessly fascinating, and beautiful. My own approach, admittedly, is to make a romantic journey out of everything and, whilst not immune to the occasional grumble, I like to think I’m optimistic, and would urge others to remain optimistic too, and to weather as best you can the storms we have undoubtedly battled through in recent years.

So, in spite of the evidence of my own eyes, I don’t believe personal blogging is dead, though it does appear to be boiling itself down to the essence of those writers who prefer the long form means of expression, and perhaps releasing the others to the steam heat of the pithy tweet. None of this is to say, of course, I shall be quitting the blog in a huff at my failure to build an influential platform. I wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway. So long as the Rivendale Review is concerned, it’s very much business as usual – whatever that business is.

As always, to those who follow along and read me, I say thank you. You are a special bunch, clearly more discerning and erudite in your tastes. I’m all the better, and humbled for your company. And to those whose blogs I read, thank you for your continuing efforts, and for the myriad ways you help inform and broaden my own world view, and from a perspective that matters, this being from the ground up.

Thank you for listening.

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To the man on the Clapham Omnibus

The Clapham Omnibus – Courtesy Wikemedia Commons

Dear sir,

As I grow older, the less I realize I know. Perhaps you feel the same? It’s more than simply forgetting what I’ve learned. It’s realizing what I know is of vanishing consequence in a rapidly changing and morally dubious world. If the trend continues, it suggests I will soon be waking to find the rise and fall of my own breath is the only certainty I possess.

Such feelings have had a sobering effect on my writing, which has now slowed to a ponderous circling while I look out of the window for a safe place to land. But since I know less with each passing story, it’s harder to wrap them up in neat conclusions. As for a safe position, I doubt there is one, and would value your opinion on that. Where, dear sir, lies the hope?

Casting our eyes across the pond, the situation in America is perplexing. Climate change is accelerating the desertification of California while, politically, our dear cousins seem to be approaching an authoritarian dictatorship, replete with rag-tag armed militias. Thank goodness we do not have the right to bear arms here, or we might be following down the same rocky path. Still, all is far from well at home. Our proud nation is to be awarded the dubious crown of pariah state, as we break international law, reneging on an already ratified BREXIT position. Can this be true? And is it also true, we are now stripped of our European identity? True, our country is now facing the likely break-up of its precious union? And of course, to cap it all, we have Covid, warming up for its second wave, while conspiricists – who have evidently never ridden the Clapham Omnibus – are still saying it’s a hoax.

The times are indeed uncertain, and the great despairing roar of it has me looking instinctively for shelter while I try to work out what’s going on. Answers on a postcard please, for I am at a loss. I am certain only that, in the grand scheme of things, it makes little difference what I think or write, if I tie my stories up with a neat little bow, or leave them flapping in the chill wind of existential oblivion. Having explored the nature of the times we’re living, in my present story, the only conclusion that makes sense, is to have my hero and all his friends crushed under a rain of ruthless hammer blows. But surely, sir, that cannot be right.

Indeed, my characters have been grumbling about this, demanding I keep going until the way is clearer. Try harder, they say. But they have forgotten that’s not how it works. I just take notes. It’s them I look to for the answers, and it troubles me to see them as bewildered as I. Ask the man on the Clapham Omnibus, they say. So here I am, sir, asking.

The only meaningful conclusion I can draw, and one that is half-way hopeful, is we should stop groping for external solutions to perceived threats, the nature of which, we know nothing about. It is to stop gazing up at the sky, and to look instead to others, to friends, to family, to whatever grounds us in reality. This is not to seek answers to the world’s ills, more we seek personal meaning, and all in spite of the turbulent moral landscape we find ourselves abroad in. It is to rediscover and to encourage what is honourable in all our selves, and let our story close with the whisper of that, because that’s what honour does: it whispers. It does not go out with a bang of righteous indignation.

Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad conclusion. What do you think?

The movers and the shakers have decided the best way to change the world is to move fast, and break things, to make a fine art of lying about it and to blame others for the resulting mess. But the solution to such duplicity is not a golden trumpet blasting out a revelatory truth – whether we are blowing it ourselves or not. We all know any reasonable attempt at the truth will be cut down at the gates by rabid trolls, before it’s even got its pants on.

Thus, the last bastion of moral rectitude resides with each of us and, as it always has, with you, dear sir, the man on the Clapham Omnibus. But if you’ll forgive me, I’m thinking the best we can do right now, is shield our flame lest the ill winds puff it out. We should plant our honour like a seed in the earth, then cover it and hunker down for better times, and a different season, because this is not that season. Come spring, who knows? But who knows when spring will come?

Writing in his farewell book “A man without a country”, that genial, old curmudgeon, Kurt Vonnegut, said: “If there’s anything they hate, it’s a wise human. So be one anyway. Save our lives and your own. Be honourable.“

No, dear sir, sadly neither you nor I can influence the potential disasters of BREXIT, or Covid, or the coming US elections. But then, however these things turn out, they aren’t going to provide anything by way of lasting meaning to our beleaguered souls. All we’re looking at, in whatever future unfolds, is more division, tribalism, and shouting at one another, because there’s always someone who doesn’t get what they want. Our world is defined by self-identifying victims – genuine or otherwise – whose purpose in life is to nurture only their sense of perpetual hurt, and to cast for perpetrators to be vilified. But if others have forgotten what it means to be honourable, right-minded riders of the Clapham Omnibus, or have simply abandoned it as an inconvenient anachronism for these, our modern times, it doesn’t mean we should all do the same.

Perhaps then, I have answered my own question.

What do you think, sir?

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The writing life – growing some soul?

The online world remains the easiest outlet for creative expression, at least one that comes with an audience. I’d say it was my “preferred” option but that would be to suggest I have any other choice which, in common with many of my kind – at least those of us who have wised up – I don’t. However, I do actually “prefer” it because there’s a world of difference between writing and publishing and while writing online grants us the freedom to explore stories in a direction of our own choosing, publishing does not. Publishing just wants more of the same. Publishing wants what sells.

This is not to say I don’t still toy now and then with at least the idea of flirting with the printed press again, but the essentials there haven’t changed in forty years which means if long-form fiction’s your thing, you need an insider’s contacts to avoid the slush pile and to deliver your musings with an auspicious whack, directly to a commissioning editor’s desk. Without that advantage, you’re going nowhere my friend.

There’s self-publishing online for money of course, but for all its blather, writers should be wary of its over-hyped promise because this won’t make you rich and famous either. Kurt Vonnegut nailed it when he said the arts were no way to make a living, only to grow some soul. What does that mean? It means we have to buckle down and a get ourselves a proper job first. Anything will do, so long as it leaves us time and energy at the end of the day to write. The trouble is, being an amateur hack, we’re likely to be as unknown in our sixties as we were in our twenties. Is that a failure of ourselves as writers? Well, it depends how much you grow your soul in the mean time, and none of us are best placed to be the judge of that anyway.

I suspect it’s a journey we must all make as individuals, so nothing I say here is going to make sense to anyone just starting out, and they’ll still likely believe against the odds they can change the world with their story, if only the world would wise up and recognise their genius. But trust me, it wont.

It’s a funny old business, growing soul. I mean, if writing or any other form of art were truly integral to that process, one might think thrashing out the most perfect story or poem, then unceremoniously deleting it wouldn’t matter, that if anyone read it or not would be irrelevant, that growing one’s soul is a purely private matter, no audience required. Except to me it does seem important, this exchange from one mind to another, writer to reader, that unless we writers complete that particular end of the bargain, the muse or the genii or the daemons who gave us this stuff in the first place won’t be happy until they’ve goaded us into finding an audience for it. Or this may just be a sign of residual vanity in me, that forty years of writing has left my soul the same button-mushroom size it was when I was ten.

In the bad old days this primeval urge to find an audience would deliver us into the hands of the vanity press. You could tell them apart by the fact they accepted your manuscript in glowing terms, while the other lot simply returned it unread. Yes, the vanity press would butter you up no end, appeal to your – well – vanity, then print your novel and deliver you a crate of the things, leaving the rest to you, which is to say high and dry and probably skint. Beware, vanity is a terrible thing and can lead you into all kinds of trouble.

They’re still around, those shysters, moved mostly online now, offering also their worthless authoring services like reading and editing, all of which still leave the writer out of pocket and no nearer publication than when they started. So don’t be tempted, or at least if you are don’t be surprised when you get shafted.

I look to the online world then as a means of pacifying that particular whim of the muse who seems curiously untroubled by giving the work away. And it has to be said there’s something quietly subversive about it that I enjoy. Yes, you can charge for it on Amazon and Smashwords, but then the downloads shrivel to nothing, because everyone online is after free-stuff and the value of a work is, after all, in its scarcity, and regardless of the fact you spent a year writing it, your novel can be copied and pirated in a nanosecond, rendering it essentially worthless – at least in money terms – anyway.

The downside is that while the Internet has the advantage of a potentially global reach, for readers actually hitting upon one’s work it’s a bit like sitting on a needle in a haystack – an entirely chance and unlikely event. So, building even a humble readership can be rather a slow business. Why bother then?

Well, perhaps the truth is if we were wealthy enough we might spin our musings from the psychiatrist’s couch, whittle down to the nub of things that way, but instead we write for the mysterious “other”. The “other” understands us perfectly; they just never write back to say so, and that’s fine because if they did, we’d know it wasn’t them anyway.

Is that growing some soul? I don’t know, but I’m still writing, always looking for the next story, the next tumble down the wormholes of my dizzy head.

And that has to count for something.

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The writing life – the secret of getting that novel published!

Publishing a novel? Well, it’s easy. Anyone can publish a novel these days. You write it, then you put it on the Internet. You do it yourself through a blog, serving it out of a Dropbox account, or use the likes of Smashwords, Wattpad, FreeEbooks, Amazon, and sundry others I’ve yet to make the acquaintance of, who serve it out for you. Your work gets published for free and people will read it. Guaranteed. Simple. Amazon and Smashwords even let you set a fee, so you can actually make money at it. The downside? Unless you go viral, don’t expect to make more than pocket-money, and your chances of going viral are about the same as coming up on the lottery. People come up on the lottery all the time, but the chances are it won’t be you, so don’t bank on it. Most likely you’ll make nothing at all.

I can feel your disappointment right there, because money’s the thing, isn’t it? What you really want to know is how to make serious money at it, or maybe even just enough to quit the day job and write full time. So, let’s go there. You write your novel and, if you don’t fancy online self-publishing, or it just doesn’t seem real to you, then send it to a traditional publisher or a literary agent. But this route is even more like a lottery. Someone always wins, but the chances are you won’t. In fact, the odds are so stacked against you doing it this way, it makes more sense not to bother, and only a fool would waste years filling out their ticket anyway.

There are exceptions, not to be cynical, but you need an edge. Your name needs to be widely known for some other reason, either by fair means or foul, because publishing’s about selling and names sell. Or you need an influential contact in the industry, someone who can sing your praises to a commissioning editor. Or you can enter your novel for a prestigious literary prize, but that’s an even bigger lottery. Either way, without your invite to the party, you’re not getting in, and that’s just the way it is. Always has been.

Persistence pays? Yes, I’ve heard that too, mostly from published literary types selling tips to writers who can’t get published, and maybe it’s true, worth a dabble perhaps, but don’t waste your life trying . Don’t spend decades hawking that novel, constantly raking back over old ground with rewrites, moving commas this way and that and coming up with yet one more killer submission, then beating yourself up when it’s rejected. Again. Don’t lie awake at night grinding your teeth, wondering what’s wrong with you, wondering why no one wants to publish your story. Chances are you’ll never know. So let it go, it’s done. Now write another.

What is a writer for? Do they create purely in order to give pleasure to others? Or do they do it for the money? Do they crave critical acclaim? Or is it more simply to satisfy a need in themselves? Why does anyone create anything that serves no practical purpose? I mean, come on, it’s just a story after all.

In my own writing I explore things, ideas that interest me. I enjoy painting and drawing too, but it’s the writing that gets me down to the nitty gritty, writing that is the true melting pot of thought, the alchemists alembic through which I attempt a kind of self-sublimation, a transformation from older, less skilful ways of thinking, and through which I try to make sense of a largely unintelligible world. The finished product, the novel, the story, the poem or whatever, is almost incidental, but until it’s finished the conundrum, the puzzle I’ve set myself isn’t complete. Completion is the last piece of the jigsaw, the moment of “Aha!” – or more often a wordless understanding that signifies a shift in consciousness, hopefully one in the right direction.

I know this isn’t what writing’s about for others. But most likely those others are a good deal younger than I am, and not as well acquainted with the realities of hawking the written word in exchange for a living. I’ve been writing for fifty years, never made a bean, haven’t even tried since ’98.  This is just the way it’s evolved for me, but don’t let that put you off. You do what you want. You may get lucky, or die trying.

How to get a novel published? Other than giving it away online, who knows? It’s always been a mystery to me, but in one sense persistence does indeed pay, in that it eventually yields a little known secret about getting yourself published, and I’ll share it with you now: when it comes to the art of writing, getting yourself published isn’t really the most important thing.

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For whom do we write?

Whenever we observe ourselves asking this question, of our selves, we can take it as a sign our energy is low and our brains so far out of our heads we’ve lost our vital perspective on life and begun to expect something back from the world other than what we’ve already got.

When we write online it means we have found the conduit to traditional publishing closed, so we direct the stream of our frenetic output to wherever the words will stick. We keep a blog, we put stories up on Wattpad, and Smashwords and Feedbooks. And the pressure that would arise in our hearts, were we denied any platform for our work, as in the old pre-Internet days, diminishes. We feel temporarily sated. Thus we answer our own question: we write primarily for ourselves.

Or rather we should.

The temptation with online media however is that we can all too easily get hung up on the statistics the media providers provide us with. How many people have read me today? How many followers do I have? How “influential” is my blog? How many messages/comments/likes? How many downloads of Langholm Avenue, of Push Hands, of Between the Tides? And how much more attention might I attract if I wrote one more essay/poem/blog-entry/novel?

Of course all these questions can be reinterpreted as meaning: does anybody know or care I’m here at all? Such existential angst is lurking pretty much at the bottom of us all, and whether we write or not, it is always through some form of expression, verbal or visual we test our status in the world. We push at the world and observe its reaction. And learn from it.

Before the advent of social media, we were restricted in our potential audience to the small circle of people whom we actually met day to day. And to this circle we would brag, and flirt and preen, and tell our anecdotes in order to feel liked and accepted by the degree of warmth and humour and friendship we received back. Now of course, our potential audience is global. We can brag and preen and flirt with the whole world if we so choose. And if we do so choose, it will drain us to a dried up husk. It will make us feel only the more stupid and small, the exact opposite of the dream to which we aspire; the dream of wholeness.

I do not use my Facebook account in spite of Facebook’s periodic nagging for me to do so. But I do not understand how anyone would think the minutia of my life worth keeping up with and see in Facebook only a mask that would allow me to present a side of myself that is fictional, aimed solely at attracting admirers, as a movie star attracts fans. I might post pictures of myself in aviator sunglasses perhaps, while driving my sport’s car, or while climbing a mountain , or while diving into an azure sea from the deck of a yacht while a blonde haired long legged girl looks on adoringly. But I would not post my morning face, my toilet habits, a picture of the cupboard under the sink where I keep my junk, nor of the hairs that habitually block the plughole of my bath, for these are not attractive things and add nothing to the fiction of the attractive, likeable, followable me.

In attracting admirers, we become temporarily reassured of our existence and our possible importance in a life that can seem otherwise empty and meaningless. Thus my three hundred followers can be interpreted as making me a more important person than the man with only fifty followers, while the man with ten thousand followers makes me feel rather inadequate to the extent that I must comfort myself with reassurances that he is somehow cheating.

The brain, the thinking organ, is a fickle creature, lost in a moment, gone like a whippet into the forest, chasing shadows. We think this, we think that, but there is no longer sufficient part of us remaining, residing in the presence of our bodies, to actually feel the fact of our existence at all, and whatever the obscure fact of it is, not to mind it in the least. Indeed the only person we really need seek the approval of is our selves. And by our selves I mean the greater part of our selves, the part who is the watcher of our thoughts. Only there will we find our rest, our peace, and our permission to simply be.

If you follow this blog, then of course I write in the knowledge of signed up listeners and I appreciate your company. But the most important listener for the writer is that inner part of himself, without whose approval nothing he wrote would possess the necessary sincerity to make it worth anyone else’s reading.

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