Why I blog

Helen Smith reflects on her first year online

While some writers might be attracted to blogging as a way of advertising their talents and increasing awareness of their name on the internet, others will worry that it might cheapen or at the very least dilute the value of what they have to offer by giving away for free what they would otherwise expect to be paid for.

When I started a blog, helensmithblog.blogspot.com, following an inspiring evening on the subject at the Writers’ Guild in April 2007, the thing I was most worried about was that it might appear rather a vain thing to do. It is, I suppose - but nothing compares to the egocentricity involved in sitting down and writing a novel, and I've done that several times, so actually I'm unembarrassed about it. After all, it's just another way of communicating.

There is a curious mixture of camaraderie and snobbishness amongst bloggers, all of us involved in a pursuit that is still seen as uncool by those on the outside, but many of us secretly convinced that the blogs we read and contribute to provide a source of information or entertainment that is superior to any of the others out there.

We can’t all be right, and indeed it is the lack of quality control that frustrates readers who have never got beyond those ghastly blogs full of musings about a person’s likes and dislikes and what they had for breakfast.

The only trick is to find a blog you like and follow the recommendations on that site to find others you might enjoy. Other than that, I think that blogging must be rather like being a member of The Caravan Club – you have to be on the inside, looking out, before you can truly appreciate the benefits.

As a writer, I like blogging because it gives me an opportunity to organise my thoughts, set down ideas and record little snippets of information or anecdotes about events that interest me – thereby freeing up a larger part of my brain to work on whatever writing project I’m engaged in at the time. It sounds unscientific but it seems to work quite well.

Sometimes there are too many ideas floating around in a writer’s head, of varying value but all demanding to be treated with equal importance. Using a diary to get rid of them doesn’t seem to do the trick for me – I have always felt a little self-conscious about writing to myself. I have a never-ending series of notebooks, of course, but those are scrappy and illegible and usually only pertinent to whatever I’m supposed to be working on at the time.

But telling a story on my blog – a publication of sorts – seems to satisfy those little germs of ideas that have no other home. Once expressed, they quieten down and leave me to get on with my work in progress.

As you might expect, blogging also enables me to keep in touch with family and friends around the world, allowing them to dip in and out of my life, managing the level of detail they take in by reading or ignoring what I have written, as they see fit. I can also interact with my readers in a way that isn’t possible by simply setting up a website and updating the news section every so often.

What I hadn't taken into account was that I would make some lovely friends through blogging. Probably the best thing about it, all the more appreciated for being totally unforeseen, is that it has brought me into contact with other writers and I have struck up genuine friendships with many of them.

Leaving jolly little notes in the comments section of a friend’s blog (perhaps with a couple of kisses by way of punctuation) is the closest that I and other members of the text generation will ever come to the sort of erudite correspondence that more famous writers have always carried on with each other by letter, often with the expectation of those letters eventually being published.

It’s not quite Amis and Larkin, I’m afraid. But it’s fun.

Blogging is not journalism, for which any professional writer might reasonably expect to be paid a decent fee, but it is an adjunct to it. When you have a blog, you are staking out your little corner of internet which you can use to say whatever you like. It offers a delicious combination of the best elements of democracy and dictatorship - you write what you like, when you like, answerable to no-one. And you control the comments section.

As to the question of whether blogging is somehow a cheap occupation because it is done for free, I would suggest that it fits comfortably among a minority of activities, including sex and charity fundraising, which actually make you feel better about yourself if done for nothing.

This article was first published in the Guild's magazine, UK Writer (Spring 2008)