writing v blogging

Bouncing around in the blogosphere as much as I have been doing lately gets all sorts of my wheels spinning.

One question that keeps pestering me is, Does blogging help my writing?

On the face of it, this is kind of a stupid question. (Yes, I do quite firmly believe that there are stupid questions.) Can blogging be separated from "writing"? Blogging is writing, right?

Yes, and no.

For example, I have a column due in 2 days and I'm not writing it. I'm blogging instead. (I'm not blocked, I just have to work on the recipe, and I haven't had the kitchen time to do that yet -- kitchen time requires different [more] energy than blogging, so, here I am.)

When I started this blog, I wrote many, many horrifically long and tedious entries. You could easily subhead those archives "The Minutia of Joan's Life" and be done with it. As time and the blog progressed, and my reading circle widened, my goals for this blog changed. I took most to heart, I think, Ann's example: blog posts should be concise.

OK -- you can stop laughing now! I am serious, because even though I still write a lot and/or way too much, I do try to limit each post to a single topic, and not write dreadful omnibus posts that cover a dozen different ideas and yet have no organizing principal. I used to do that all the time, and when I look at my archives now, I think, Ick.

When my cancer was diagnosed, I quit policing myself. But now I'm nearly 6 months post-dx, and I'm not obsessing over the cancer quite so much, and I do find myself editing again. I was reading some new blogs last week and found so much writing that was, well, unbearably twee, loaded with adjectives and alliterations and Just. Too. Much...

... and I realized, I used to write like that. I have made a conscious decision to right in a leaner, tighter style, and yet I try to remain evocative. I am unsure of both my consistency and my success, but practice can't hurt.

Yet I recognize that I'm all about the practice, now. I have outlines for three or four books I could be working on, but I'm not. I have innumerable article ideas that have literally gone nowhere. Because that's work, even though it is work I would enjoy doing. Those are much bigger, scarier projects. It's so much easier to come in here and dash off a few paragraphs than it is to work.

So it really does come down to writing versus blogging, and to be completely honest, it's not just writing here but reading other blogs that keeps me kind-of-busy, busy enough that I just "don't get to" that work that is back-burnered. Now is not the time to start anything, though -- next week is booked solid, and then my next round of diagnostics is coming up.

After that scan, though, I'll be able to make some plans, whether or not I'm working around more surgery or RAI. That gives me another 4 weeks or so of kicking around. I hope to be more than ready to move on to something more productive by then.