A blogger on the bloggery of blogging

Author Ayelet Waldman (also wife to Michael Chabon) writes about her blogging in Salon: ‘I was becoming convinced that all this blogging was having a deleterious effect on my writing. It was more than the hours I was spending posting to my blog, reading my comments page, reading other blogs, and checking my site meter. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful. The fictionalized scene I ended up with was often unrecognizable from the actual event that had been its progenitor. But in the months I had the blog, I was spewing as fast as my family was experiencing. My initial idea, that the blog would act as a kind of digital notebook, was not panning out. Once the experience was turned into words, I found that it was frozen. The fertile composting that I count on to generate my fiction was no longer happening. I needed to give up the blog. At the same time, the experience of writing about my daily life, about my reactions to contemporary events and politics, about my children and husband, was satisfying, not merely therapeutically, but creatively. I enjoyed attempting to rise to the literary challenge; I even took a sort of pleasure in occasionally failing.'