BLOGGER COMMUNITY, NOT A WRITING COMMUNITY

The blogger community runs parallel to the writing community.

From most vantage points, it’s looks similar, but it’s not.

The biggest difference is accountability, and that means money, a question of either making money, spending money, or both.

The correct answer is both.

What happens when an English major working outside their field of study decides to spend their free time writing, and writing, and writing some more?

They read, read, and read some more. They buy books like How To Grow A Novel by Sol Stein, the Fiction Writer’s Silent Partner, How To Write A Book Proposal.

Maybe they read their new books, skim them, or revert to their college habits like the student in an upper division history class who was assigned a huge Robert Caro book. They read the Index, Table of Contents, Notes, and broke it down for a ten page assignment.

Professor gave them an A with a special mention for excellence.

Submission Writers

With great enthusiasm the new writer sends their best work to the most lucrative markets, then the second tier, and if all else fails, start a blog.

Because they are writers, not tech wizards, and not into throwing money away, they start on a free platform like Blogspot, or WordPress.

This is where problems with accountability start. Some people see their blog work like twitter, or Facebook, and post the minutia of their lives. The results vary.

Further education in the blog-world makes them feel insecure about their free site, so they self-host. After spending money on a domain name, hosting, and design, a particular feeling rises as they circle the blogger community.

Add loads of traffic and suddenly the artful blogger becomes a Thought Leader, an Influencer, a Guru.

Their readers hang on every post, especially those that include medical problems, medication problems, their cat, their sleeping habits, their kids, their spouse. Sometimes all in the same post to cover the most bases.

Blogger Community

Over time, and with luck, the blogger becomes part newsman, forecaster, and all-round gadfly.

Without luck, connections, or persistence, a failing blogger turns bitter, or quits. They can’t stand working five hours on a monumental post, getting yelled at by their partner for wasting so much time, for the sake of two hits.

The pressure to perform, to drive traffic, to rise above the fray, grows too great.

There’s no shame in quitting, just as there’s no shame in failing to crack the submission ceiling. If you can live with the quitter tag, by all means, quit.

However, my readers don’t know how to quit any better than I do. And they expect the unexpected, like an O Henry story with a kicker at the end.

The Kicker At The End

The failed writer, the failed blogger, have a lot in common with failures of another stripe.

Stop me if you’ve heard this comparison: A true hearted writer is poet; if that’s too hard, they write short stories. They become novelists if they are bad poets and short form writers, and fill drawers with manuscripts they decide are not quite ‘ready.’

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, the same as the people who dream of becoming crime-busters, but can’t quite cut the mustard.

For example, a kid who was bullied in school, quit the football team because they didn’t like contact, but know they can kick ass as well as the next guy, wants to assume the mantle of authority. So they join their local police force.

But, they fail in the academy. So they beg to take ride-alongs with patrolmen to enhance their next attempt. Time passes, they apply to the sheriff’s office, get rejected, and fulfill their authority dream as a prison guard and work up from there.

When they finally get their chance, knowing what they did wrong last time, they make it through the academy and get hired as a policeman, an angry policeman. No one but another officer knows the hard road they took to get on the force, and no one but another officer knows the mean streets like them.

The next time you see a burly guy in uniform punching a girl in the head, or bouncing an old man with a cane to the ground with a shield, or breaking up a first aide station for protesters, think of the ways to deal with people better.

It takes a bad man with evil intent to kneel on someone’s neck for nine minutes while they beg for their life; to stay calm with their hand in their pocket all the way down.

A black life didn’t matter to that policeman, but his accountability matters in a world of hurt.

He didn’t start the fire, but his callous regard for human life shines a brighter light on finding solutions sooner than later.