Readers and writers blog

By definition, anyone who submits a comment to this site is intelligent, good-looking and, as Garrison Keillor would say, has above-average children — we’ll even throw in your ancestors as well — but sometimes a comment is especially meritorious.

So thank you, Kevin Dickinson, for raising a subject in our April 13 comments that merits further discussion — the pressure on bloggers to post more material and more frequently than most other writers write.

It’s a good point. For example, our blog entries average from 600 to 700 words, about the same as a 15- to 20-inch newspaper column, and we post entries twice a week. Most newspaper columnists these days, unless they’re working very hard, generally don’t file more than one or two columns a week.¹

(Remember to ask me about a column I once wrote.)

As I told Kevin, certain subjects like his — Words — and ours — writing — are harder to post about frequently than, say, those personal diaries you find all over the blogosphere where the writer can post the equivalent of “Well, not much to report today, but here it is. . .” I’m sure these weblogs, like daily letters home, are great for people who know the writer personally rather than electronically, but for the rest of us. . .

There are exceptions, and they’re on our blogroll. For example, June at Bye Bye, Pie, is an astonishingly good daily diarist, but that’s because she is an astonishingly good writer with a lot of imagination and a lot of personal, chit-chatty style. (Good proofreader, too.)

Bernita Harris at An Innocent A-Blog also is remarkable, and she usually writes about our hard subject, writing. She’s cut back temporarily to three posts a week, but that’s because she has a book in progress.

Another difficult subject, art, is handled with apparent ease by Charley Parker at lines and colors, again on an almost daily basis. And there’s Heather Armstrong at dooce, Franklin at The Panopticon, May at about a nurse, Rod McBride at Midwest Rock Lobster . . . well, you can see them all over there at the right.

I admire them all because they all have something to say, they say it with grace and integrity, and they do so at their own pace — some of them much more amply and expeditiously than we do.

Anyway, here are our new offerings today in Works:

• Chapter Six: San Mateo of Gerard Jones’ Ginny Good in nonfiction and Chapter Thirteen: Descent of Steve Karmazenuk’s The Unearthing in fiction.

Oh yeah, the column I once wrote:

I remember as a reporter being envious of columnists — what a soft job, I thought — until I was asked to write a weekly column. Of course, I still had to do my reporting job, and since I was so old-fashioned that I didn’t want to express opinions about issues I reported on, finding subjects was more difficult than I had foreseen.

There’s an old joke about news being so slow that newspapers are tempted just to run names from the telephone book. I actually wrote a column like that — not a bad one, either — using names from a phone directory of a city of about 25,000. I found a man named Mailman who in fact was a milkman. I found a Dr. Scholl who didn’t specialize in feet. I added up loose change — the total of Penneys, Nichols and even a Dime listed in the directory.

My real coup was that I found a guy who was a real credit to everyone who knew him — because that was his name, Real Credit. Of course, it was a Franco-American city in northern New England where ‘real’ would be pronounced ‘rey-AL’ and ‘credit’ would be ‘cre-DEE.’ But it worked in print.

And now that old story has helped me get another blog entry done. We recycle.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

1. The legendary Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith at one time was writing five columns a week, but even he had to cut back in his later years.

2. The image above was borrowed from the May 3, 2007, entry at HRmarketer.com blog, no photo credit listed.