So those of you who read this on LiveJournal might have noticed an odd half-conversation mirrored in from Twitter earlier today. Here's the full story.

avflox: I don't understand people who stream tweets to their blogs. Tweets can be mundane but fun because they're short and sweet. But on a blog?
avflox: I vote we upgrade "if you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all" to "if you have nothing to say, DON'T FREAKING POST."

infinitealis: It's called a tumblelog nowadays, but Back In The Day that's just how blogging was done. It's so oldskool it's new.
infinitealis: I think this goes back to what Jen was talking about the other day and the difference between a 'blog' and LJ.
infinitealis: One's a conversation, the other's a dictation.

avflox: it's mind-numbingly boring. I'm with Maggie Mason: No One Cares What You Had For Lunch.

infinitealis: To be honest, I think that holds true whether you say it in 20 words or 2,000. 20 is at least easier to skim.

Quoted From: From Twitter

I have to admit this made me think; why do we write what we do in our blogs? Who are we writing for? And what image of ourselves are we attempting to convey?

I'm going to admit it straight up that I write primarily for myself. In three, five, ten years' time I'm going to come back to think and think, "Fuck, I was a tool." Because that's what I do; I do it with my (thankfully brief flirtation with) paper journals, with my sketchbooks and with my old fiction. You don't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been, and I can usually at least feel relief that nowadays I'm a completely different type of tool than I was x-number of years ago. But discounting myself – because it's a kind of cheap answer – it occurs to me that I really have two separate 'sets' of audiences I write for, and two separate types of posts I produce for them.

The first type of post is the 'essay' post. Like this one, or that month where I got obsessed with typography, or anything that winds up on this page. Essay posts are shot off into the aether; targeted at everyone and no-one. They're personal, but they reflect my opinions rather than my life.

The second type of post – which on the whole tends to be rarer – is the journal post. These are my vehicle for blathering about my day-to-day existence, and they are targeted – inasmuch as they're targeted at anyone – towards my friends and lurkers.¹ Because, realistically, I don't expect random strangers to be even remotely interested in my day-to-day life. And here's the whole crux of the issue; I think life is boring and opinions are interesting. Not just for myself, but for everyone; I never started following someone online because I thought their life was interesting. It's always been their products; their fiction, their opinions, their art. It's only once I've got that hook into what someone does that I start getting interested in who they are. I think it's part of my Writer's Disease; in a lot of ways I see people's daily lives as the downtime between episodes. My voyeuristic tendencies only kick in after I connect with the canon.

The other thing is, I like honesty.

And this is where I have problems with self-help blog books like No One Cares What You Had For Lunch. When I read a post that's obviously been deliberately composed to make the author seem in some way exotic and 'interesting' my teeth grate. Like trying to read fanfic passed off the the mould of Srs Literature, it sets me on edge, reminds me of that Russel Davies blog post where he dispensed what I consider to be such a profound piece of advice I'm going to put it on a completely new line. In bold.

The way to be interesting is to be interested.

Davies then goes on to list a bunch of ways to Be Interested and you know the funny thing? Almost all of them focus on being interested in something external. Something that's not yourself. The problem I have with a lot of Srs Blogs – the sort books like No One Cares seem to produce en masse – is that they're presenting the author as the main topic of glamorous interest. Going to the shop becomes an epic journey of self-discovery. Meeting a friend for coffee is a quintessential distillation of the Zeitgeist. Big words and flowery prose abound. Everything. Is. Very. Important.

There's something here, I think. Some great chasm between where I stand and where this is. Because, the thing is, this kind of writing is popular. It's popular in the same way Big Brother and celebrity gossip magazines are popular. Two things I've never, ever had any time for. Maybe I missed an important stage of life, the part where someone sat me down and described, in detail, why I should care what Paris Hilton ate for breakfast or who Brad Pitt is dating. I am not remotely interested in the faux-glamorous lives of these people any more than I am the faux-glamorous lives of some bloggers. I don't even believe it exists, and I prefer my fantasy to be honest.

Life, on the whole, is pretty dull. Long, flat streaks of monotony punctuated by brief flashes of pain and confusion and jokes that no-one understands except for you and the people who've known you for the last decade. I like that life; it's real, and it's honest and it's no coincidence that Loki And Sigmund Go To The Shops is one of my favourite scenes to write. Because ultimately I'm a writer, not a gossip journalist. And what writers – good writers – do is the mundane. The dragons and lasers and mad scientists? Anyone can do that stuff. The way you make it real is by filling in the details, the stuff people can really relate to. And that stuff? When it's happening to you? It's boring as fucking batshit, and the only way to learn it is from the ground up.

But… what the fuck does this have to do with Twitter, Dee?

Glad you asked, inner voice of doubt. Because I think that – in a lot of ways, and for a lot of people – Twitter is the most honest and most mundane blogging of all. Like when I walk into the supermarket and find Orange Tang for the first time. I don't really want to write a 2,000 word essay on Orange Tang,² but I do want to share that I saw it. So I whip out my mobile phone and – in 140 characters or less – SMS off my cultural outrage to the internet. This kind of spur-of-the-moment mundanity isn't something to be reviled or silenced or ridiculed; it should be embraced. Because life is like that and it's wonderful. And yeah, it's not interesting to everybody. Some people will even find the minutia of your life (gasp!) boring. It takes a lot of balls to be boring, and we're back to dragons and lasers territory again, because it takes a lot of personality to make the mundane interesting. Not by tarting it up, but by embracing its dullness.

On the other hand, I'm still going to go home and decrease the frequency of my Twitter updates like I've been meaning to do for the last week…

1. I'm sure there are some of you… right? ^
2. In case you're wondering about the attraction, Orange Tang comes up as a frequent blót amongst Lokeans. Naturally, Corner!Loki hates the stuff, but before last week I'd never even seen it. ^

Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.