Not All That Glitters

Over the past few days, I've been exploring new features for this blog. I've visited many fellow bloggers, and discovered that they are all much more flash than me. There are beautiful photographs, incredible designs, slide shows, and some have thousands of followers from around the world. There are tweets, badges, live feeds, villagers dancing around bonfires, and on one, a tray of virtual champagne and hors d'oeurves popped out...No, I'm kidding about the bonfires.

And it made me wonder, what would Faulkner do? Did Tolstoy need to know if anyone was reading? I hear George Eliot and Ernest Hemingway sent very few tweets. Jane Austen sat quietly by her fire and wrote amazing pieces, stellar studies of personality and place, without getting immediate feedback. Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers used good old fashioned pen and ink and hunt and peck manual typewriters, the kind I learned to write on. It belonged to my mother, and I still have it, along with her Pendleton wool jacket, my father's gray mohair zip up sweater from 1957 and an old-fashioned letter opener from my grandmother that has tiny carved elephants on the top. Elephants for memory, and because they have very tough hides, two useful things for any writer.

So the ultimate result of my three-day, comparison blog-hopping extravaganza is this: there will be no flash here. If all goes well, if the winds are right and I keep my sails trim, there will be substance. It is essentially, as Dorothea Brande discusses at length in Becoming a Writer (1934) "appointment writing." I return, with a sigh, to my own virtual leather armchair and glass of cabernet, to try to capture an experience, a moment, a personality, or event that has beauty and meaning and touches the universal. I return a happy and contented writer, grateful for my few followers who for some reason are kind enough to listen to me.

There is value in the old, the simple, and the straightforward. Perhaps one day I will write a piece that Faulkner would have wanted to read, that Hemingway would have pondered before he used it for target practice. In the meantime, pour the wine, spill the ink, and remove that damn live feedjit gadget. With all due respect, I don't need that kind of pressure.