My dear friend Scott Rosenberg has written a great book, titled Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. Due from Crown (which also published his wonderful first book, Dreaming in Code) in July, it’s bound to instantly become the definitive account of weblog history. (If you know of my background as a former copyeditor, you will appreciate the level of excitement that it took to elicit that split infinitive in the last sentence.) But Say Everything is way more than that: It’s a also a page-turner about start-ups and falling-aparts (in love and business), the fascinating (and seemingly eternal) tensions between commerce and idealism, the awesome power of our urge to communicate, and the sometimes unbearable pain of being “flamed.” And many other things—all of them happening to be vitally meaningful to me in my life right now.
To take one: the pitfalls of autobiography. As a monologuist who makes a living talking about myself to strangers, I’ve had to navigate the border between public and private with increasing sensitivity. Mostly, this has to do with my wife and son, who are at the center of my life. I want to preserve their privacy, and also maintain a sanctified family space for myself. At the same time, my natural impulse as a performer is to talk about what is most important to me—which would naturally include a lot about … my wife and son. So there’s something of a dilemma. The same goes with my early attempts here at blogging: I want to write with the kind of intimacy that will honor the attention of my visitors, but I am still determined to preserve that privacy zone around my family.
What to do? Well, I haven’t figured it out yet. But I’ve gotten an enormous amount of guidance (both inspirational and cautionary) from the stories told in Say Everything. I’ve learned about bloggers who started out spilling their guts, then closed down completely to save their personal relationships, then found a workable middle ground (or didn’t). I’ve seen how blogging—which Scott shows, thrillingly, to have emerged organically from the very DNA of the Internet—continually confronts its practitioners with a myriad of crises and opportunities (or, as Homer Simpson would call them, “crisis-tunities”). And, as with all of Scott’s incredible writing—online and off—in the end, I have found myself feeling profoundly hopeful, somehow.
In fact, among its many salutary effects, Say Everything has sparked me to get back to writing this blog—after a too-long hiatus—and not remain paralyzed by my usual (and often crippling) fear of my writing not being good enough, or too revealing, or too un-revealing. By rejoining this remarkable movement of self-revelators, and by just doing my best, I am happy enough making my own tiny, imperfect, incremental contribution to a sprawling history of these times. I don’t have to say everything: there’s a whole blogosphere for that—messy, democratic, running in reverse chronological order, and dodging trolls all the way.
Great post, Josh. Thanks. I similarly struggle with how much to share about my family. I like reading dooce.com, but I can’t imagine *that* level of disclosure. And not long ago I wrote about my struggle with writing resistance and of course got flamed for *that* level of sharing. I just started reading Scott’s blog this past year and have been following the progress of the book. With your endorsement I may have to give it a try. I hope you find the time and encouragement to write more here, and I hope you make it out to Minneapolis, MN some time for a show — you have Haiku Tunnel fans out here that are hungry for more!
Thanks, Scott! I’d love to get out to Minneapolis to perform! And by the way, “Say Everything” has a terrific chapter on Heather Armstrong (née Hamilton) and her dooce.com blog.
Can’t wait to read this, Josh. Thanks for directing my attention toward it!
I run into this in another dimension– I write a blog from inside my institution. And I’m always at war with myself, trying to find an authentic voice for my posts that is revealing enough to be worth reading but not unduly exposed (or exposing) for my company. Like you, I’ve finally had to surrender to the sense that it is not everything I know it could be but it is the best I can do at this time. And to keep taking that test each day.
Knowing Scott’s bright mind, there’s going to be stuff in this newest book that will instantly feed into my wrestling with it. And, but for this post, I might have missed it!
Hello Josh,
David here again. Still blogless.
Good to see you posting again and perhaps coming to some sort of compromise with your fear of the imperfect.
I can strongly relate to your quandary regarding public/personal exposition (or is that exhibition?). My wife, the still wonderful Barbarella, is a weekly columnist here in San Diego. Each week, her column titled, “Diary of a Diva” chronicles her, and therefore by association, my, life and the lives of our families and friends.
There have been many weeks when we would discuss how much detail or “truth” she should reveal in her column. Is it too personal to reveal and broadcast to a million people that, like some kind of nuclear missile early-warning defense system, my head breaks out with acne if I am around a woman a few days before her special monthly “woman time”? When does telling *your* story become exploitation of the other characters? How willing are you to risk hurting the feelings of others for your own personal gain (my deadline is looming and I’ve got nothing to write about! AAHHHGGG!)?
Barbarella has written a column every week for 5 years now. That’s a lot of stories to tell without repeating oneself. She is also careful to design the arc of her collective stories like a thrill ride for her readers. If one week is light-hearted and fun, the next might be poignant and introspective, and the one after that bitchy, and so on. It seems like it becomes increasingly difficult to find fresh things to say. Now we end up doing things we’d never have chosen to do before (like go to a poodle show) and when we travel we hope events take a turn for the disastrous, just so Barbarella will have something to write about that week.
As if that wasn’t enough, Barbarella now includes a short 2-3 minute video with most of her articles (this week’s doesn’t have one). These are viewable on YouTube or by reading her articles online at the website of the San Diego Reader.
Here are a few of my observations regarding this public exposition that may be of interest:
Barbarella’s fans are fiercely loyal and addicted to her column in no small part because of her willingness to be honest and intimate about her life. If she sanitized, or watered down the content her readers wouldn’t care as much.
When reading a deeply personal story, the reader tends to try to relate the events to his or her own life — i.e. in their mind they tend to make it about themselves. So, for example, if Barbarella writes about a crazy series of events in which her sister Jane tells a white lie, gets caught out and then tries to cover it up with more lies, just making the stain of lies bigger and bigger, people reading the story don’t think, “God, Barbarella’s sister Jane is a jerk”. Instead, they think, “Oh yeah, I did that once”, or “That was just like my brother Jimmy when we went to Vegas”. People don’t know Barbarella’s sister Jane personally, so they recast the story in terms of their own lives. The point here is, even though you think you may be revealing too much about your personal family, people don’t really care if they don’t know you personally.
This brings me to the next point and that is if you want to tell a story but the details are too sensitive — you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, or get sued — all you need to do is change the gender and profession of the character involved and, even if you quote them directly, they will never recognize themselves.
Reading your writings, people will always assume they know more about you than they actually do. They will not realize how complex your life actually is or know anything of the facts you have chosen to withhold. This, of course, means that someone will from time to time lecture you, flame you, or criticize you unjustifiably but you have to realize these people do not have all the facts and they really don’t know what they are talking about. It is difficult, but you learn to ignore these people, or laugh at them, or both.
You can check out Barbarella’s past and current articles (and learn far more about our life than you probably want to know) at:
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/diary_of_a_diva
She also has a personal blog at:
http://www.divabarbarella.com
and she can also be found on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter under the name:
barbarellaf
Good luck with this brave new world — if you add Barbarella as a Twitter buddy (whatever clever name they have devised for that) she will follow yours too and then, through trickle-down blogonomics, I’ll be kept up to date as well!
Take care,
David