Yes, you get lots of unwanted junk mail, pleas for funds, opportunities for investment and you may have won the Nigerian British Argentinian Ohioan lottery. We both know you don't need more stuff, right? But what you may need is a good chance to tell your story (or stories, since telling your story quickly involves telling your neighbor's story, and your grandparents' tale, not to mention that incident that took place that time in the railroad station.)
In the fall, I am set to give a talk on Google Blogs and Websites. If you aren't using them, you might want to start since they are great places to put your story.
I email this blog to about 90 people each time I post, which is just about every day. I have wondered about the day when each of them emails me their posts on their blogs. So far, they haven't done that. I think nearly all of them don't have a blog or a web site. If they start one, it may be more sporadic than daily. I might not have that much too read, after all.
True, if you do have a blog, you might find, as I did, that the other million blogs on the net, plus the newspapers, news magazines and the others, the books, the movies, and all the other stuff to read is too thick for your story to get through. If you start your own blog and all my friends to the same, we will have reached "Irtnog." Irtnog is the title of a New Yorker article written in 1938 by E.B. White, a writer's writer. You can read the article through the link but I will summarize it for you. White's writing is more fun than a summary but the general idea is that the writers of the nation produce so much all the time that readers just can't keep up.
But basically that is nothing new. Neil Perrin, a literature prof. at Dartmouth, figured in "A Reader's Delight" that there have been quite a few American novels written. I can't find his estimate now but whatever it is, there are in addition far too many readable and unreadable nonfiction books around, just those in English, mind you, for you to read any sizable portion. You might take the view that with all of those readable items around, there is no point in adding to the piles.
That would be a mistake. Writing is good for your brain, whether you ever read what you have written or anybody else ever does. The Irtnog situation of writers without readers always applies. Even if you write to your lover, you can't be really sure that the writing gets read. (As a teacher of testing, I can tell you that even if your writing is read, the reader might not recall what you wrote. Sometimes, readers even recall what you wrote but you didn't write that. Their recall gets you confused with William Faulkner or Erma Bombeck.
But going through the construction of your words from your ideas - ah, that's building a healthy mind and a strong set of typing fingers. It also increases your awareness of really good writing when you come across it in others.
Look up Blogger and or Google Sites and see how to get started.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
