Full disclosure: I started this blog some time ago so I could create a “writer’s platform” to show agents and potential publishers. But it doesn’t come without a cost, and that is one’s privacy, even though my postings mainly focus on some aspect of reading and writing.
The idea of public and private has shifted over the years. While some people still keep private diaries and journals, as I also do, others are pouring their hearts out for all the world to see on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, X, and many more. These apps have conditioned a new generation to spill it all on the web, to not hold back. Some people even set up webcams in their houses so strangers can follow their daily routines.
Has the isolation we experience in our neighborhoods caused this overreaction on the world-wide web? Are we hungry for connection with others? When I was a child in Calgary, I knew everyone on our block. I walked to school, which allowed me to see my neighbors, both coming and going. People sat on porches in the summertime. And we all shared produce from abundant gardens. Or we helped each other out during troubled times. Of course, I’m generalizing. Such things can still be found today, but not as frequently. Back then, we formed neighborhoods, unlike today when few people know their neighbors or interact with them. Even the words neighbor and neighborhood sound quaint.
How does it affect us if we constantly turn ourselves inside out for strangers on the web or as professional writers? It may be too early to answer this question, but we can speculate, at least about writers such as myself. We learn early that if we want to create convincing characters or take our readers deeper into the world we share, then we can’t hold back. Being a writer forces us to do the dance of the seven veils. We must be willing to expose some aspects of our private selves, whether in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, and exposed we are, no matter how much we think we’re concealing.
I’ve just been reading about how Canada’s version of Chekov, Alice Munro, used dark family fissures to create the remarkable short stories she wrote that earned her the Noble Prize in Literature. These works reveal how she veiled her devastating personal world where her second husband Gerry Fremlin sexually abused Munro’s youngest daughter by her first husband. It’s difficult to conceal forever these traumas. Even the most objective academic or journalistic writing can’t conceal entirely the person behind the prose.
What effect does blogging have on us, on our relationships with ourselves and others? What does it mean not to have a private self any longer? What are the drawbacks to this kind of exposure?
What are your thoughts?
5 thoughts on “To blog or not to blog? Is blogging the question?”
I think other’s vulnerabilities help us to know we are not alone in our own struggles and situations. It’s the modern world’s neighbourhood… a way of feeling connected. For that I thank you 🙏
Well said. Thanks for expressing your thoughts here.
Thanks for adding to the conversation!
I think we (bloggers and writers) should maintain a private part of ourselves…
You have to ask yourself, before you hit Post or Comment, whether you will care in 50 years, or whether you will embarrass your children or grandchildren, or whether it will come back to haunt you.
Visitors to a blog are, at best, acquaintances. Look what those revelations cost Munro!
Are there any secrets? Are they yours? Will it affect anyone else?
Chatty is fine – but I even question some of my slightly political comments, with the next four years going to make me wonder.
I use everything I can, as an actor does, to create my characters/roles. But most people shouldn’t be able to determine what I used, or whether I used it unmodified. Some of the hardest sections to write in the final volume of the Pride’s Children mainstream trilogy, LIMBO are where I don’t have enough personal experience to base the details on something I know well, but instead have to figure out what has changed in the field of psychology in this century. Took a LOT of reading.