Wanna Play?

If blogging is like shooting a basketball hoping it will find a basket from where you stand, commenting on other blogs is like walking from driveway to driveway asking to join in others’ existential basketball.

Though I’ve made modest forays into blogland, visiting and commenting on other blogs was never part of my blog life. This time around, those visits seem the most vital part. I haven’t “met” anyone in any real sense, but I’ve met some of their moments and meditations on the subject of everything. I’ve received comments and felt moved to offer them, and the exchange, like breathing, has brought me into and out of myself. I’ve learned so much about blogs from reading. And I’ve learned about writing.

Not all aspiring writers read.

In putting it so, I’ve shown restraint. I love my students—just being around their ambition quickens my own—but they are often skeptical of the connection between reading and writing. Many don’t see all they might learn from other authors, and some claim reading others’ work will choke the creativity of their own writing.

Teaching them to read like writers—recognizing the ten and a half choices a good writer makes in forging one sentence—opens their eyes to a different vision of what it means to be a writer. It is like seeing an old-style newspaper photo and discovering it is made up of a sea of regularly spaced dots, each some subtle variation of gray.

They are not always happy to discover how much they control.

But the exchange between reading and writing isn’t always bookish. Saul Bellow said of an early novel, “I was very moved by the books I had read in school, and I brought an offering to the altar.” Scrutinizing a work of art is the first step of admiring it, the first step in aspiring to it. And refreshingly, a writer’s motive isn’t always egotism or competitiveness. Bellow’s desire was a sort of worship, a way of answering the gods of his idolatry.

Not all the writing I encounter in blogs is stunning—though, if you are reading this, I’m not talking about your work.

Many of those blogs are nonetheless inspiring. Sometimes, writing transcends technique. As with any other instrument, the artistry resides in the artist’s spirit, not necessarily in the tools he or she wields.

In 2003, Mark Salzman wrote The True Notebooks, which was a memoir of his creative writing class at Central Juvenile Hall in LA. The book includes a healthy sampling of his students’ work (with permission), and Salzman’s most sensible act is offering it with very little intrusion. It is baffling to see broken voices of murderers and thieves speak so eloquently. Many of the samples are rife with sliding logic and mixed metaphor. Yet the immediacy of the writing is more impressive because of those “mistakes,” communicating that ultimately writing rests on having something to say and a desperate desire to say it.

At their best (and worst) blogs exude the same urgency, a sense that the writer is oh-so-close to a discovery or a way to turn some commonplace into the supreme observation, the one that explains it all.

I want to approach that altar myself.

So I walk around the web, reading all the work I find there, sometimes leaving a polite “Hope you don’t mind a comment from a stranger—” before launching in. I hope no one minds. I’m having such fun, and only want to play.