May 29, 2006. I sometimes wonder why I blog. It's not like I get hundreds, or even dozens of hits. Probably only a handful, actually. When I post, it's like I'm just throwing out a note in a bottle. And that's OK. I suspect one of the reasons I keep blogging is simply to keep nudging myself creatively.
My brother, Dave, the classical music critic for the "Oregonian," sent me these comments from Terry Teachout, the WSJ drama critic. His blog is enormously popular. He can be annoying, impossibly self-absorbed, but he makes some points that resonated with me.
"O.K., so why have I spent the past three years pouring so much time and energy into a medium for which I don’t get paid a cent? I can’t even begin to list the reasons, but these are the big ones:
(1) Total control. I can blog about anything I want, whenever I want, at whatever length I want. All this is in and of itself pleasurable.(2) Self-fertilization. It’s also creatively stimulating. The act of blogging gives me ideas that sooner or later find their way into my print-media work.
(3) Self-promotion. If you read my blog, you know about whatever I happen to be up to at any given moment: speeches, radio appearances, my latest print-media pieces, whatever. You can also use it to read my bio, buy my books, and send me e-mail.
(4) Dialogue. Not only does blogging put me in touch with readers who have interesting things to say, but it’s introduced me to countless new writers whose blogs I now read daily, some of whom have become good friends.
(5) Rejuvenation. Most of them are younger than I am. Some are much younger. The older you get, the more inclined you are to start looking inward—which isn’t a bad thing. But blogging has had the unintended consequence of putting me in closer touch with new points of view at the precise moment in my life cycle when I might have been more naturally inclined to pay less attention to them."
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