There is a trend in the publishing industry to get fiction authors to keep blogs. The publishers have seen how blogs allow authors to connect with audiences in a way that was previously impossible. That connection is an incredible marketing tool. It can be used to create enormous loyalty in readers and to fuel buzz about a particular author’s work. There’s just one problem. While all bloggers are writers, not all writers are bloggers.
Blogging is much closer to newspaper column writing than it is to novel writing. For a blog you have to come up with subject after subject and spin it into something that will interest people all within a few short paragraphs. A novel is the slow development of characters and plot over hundreds of a pages. A blog is like improvisational dancing in public. A novel is like practicing for painful hours in private for a large public performance. It puzzles me that publishers, and the world at large, should assume that a person who is good at novels would therefore be good at keeping a blog.
Of course publishers have always asked authors to do uncomfortable things in the name of marketing. Many writers have learned with dismay that being an author means public appearances and speeches and self promotion as well as writing books. The imposition of blog writing is just another manifestation of this same practice.
I both love and dislike the fact that more authors are being pressured into keeping blogs. I love the chance I get to interact with the authors, to get glimpses into their lives. I dislike sensing the discomfort some of these same authors as they have to learn a new medium with a live audience. As a blogger I hope that some of the writers grow into these imposed blogs and begin to love maintaining them as much as I have loved maintaining mine.
I think suggesting that some people are “good at” blogging imposes an assumption on blogging that your goals in maintaining a blog are the same as someone else’s. In order for someone to be “good at” it, there must be a set of criteria for what makes a “good” blog.
I don’t think such criteria exist, at least not separate from any one person’s individual biases. Lots of people keep blogs for lots of different reasons. As long as you aren’t failing at your own personal goals for maintaining a blog, I don’t see how you can be bad at it.
The same argument could be made about novel writing. But if you wish you can change the words “be good at” for “enjoy.”