WRITING: Personality in a Blog, by Guest Author, Ben

Here as promised is an essay so graciously offered here by Ben, author of The Life and Times of Neutrino Man:
Whenever people comment on my writing, especially if they’re complimentary,
I love to tell them how I almost flunked my junior English class in high
school. Technically I did flunk, but it being the teacher’s last year, she
decided to pass me anyway. I flunked because we had a paper due and I was so
ashamed and embarrassed by my abilities as a writer than I had instead
willfully chosen not to hand one in. I thought I was the most dreadful
writer.

I still often grapple with that feeling.

I’d never have had a web site though, nor would writing as anything other
than an embarrassing chore occur to me, had it not been for my first
semester freshman English teacher in college. She was a young grad student,
quite attractive, and to my surprise she seemed to be quite fond of my
writing. When I had first started her class I wrote in a very structured
manner because I was better at hiding myself and my voice that way. I
followed the rules given to me by high school English teachers and it was
only by some slip of accident that anything of me escaped at all.

I remember, the slip was some minor detour into a story about how often the
washing machine at home would try to electrocute us. I used to sit on the
machine and more often than not, it would leave my ass tingling. She
laughed, and perhaps I just thought she was beautiful, or maybe I was eager
for encouragement. Either way, I loved it. I ate it up. As the semester
progressed, my originally stilted writing became more enthusiastic
exercises. I experimented. The final paper of the semester was assigned to
be a research paper. Encouraged and emboldened, I wrote a satire modeled
closely on Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” but the problem confronted in the
essay mostly focused on computer literacy.

Despite so clearly ignoring the assignments in the class, my grades were
very complimentary and by the end of the semester I had grown bold enough to
show my writing to friends and people I knew. The positive reactions I got,
for the first time in my life, were enough to keep this idea of writing
forever alive in my head. Sometimes I think of it as more a curse than
anything, some need unmatched by ability, but on those rare occasions when I
do it well, nothing I do pleases me more.

It was in this vein, I suppose, that I started my web site a few years ago.
Because I’m neurotic, I ultimately grew discouraged and abandoned it, but
because of that flitting idea in my head, I came back and resurrected the
site. On my return I looked around at other sites of this nature and
immediately recognized that the vast majority of them are crap.

They’re just awful. Excluding sites where the content simply consists of
IMspeak or poll results, a lot of people are given to reporting their life’s
happenings in the simple sparse style of the itinerary. “I went to the mall.
Malls suck. I bought pants. They’re cute,” and so on. They’re not at all
appealing and in reading those, like many people who keep such
sites, I grappled over how personal I should be.

I was acutely aware of the perils of going too personal. It’s quite easy to
get lazy and to just launch into the tired old “I did this followed by that”
formula. So initially I had decided to try to avoid writing about my
contemporary life. I could write about things that happened in the past, but
nothing current, and I was to consciously try to avoid maudlin writing about
perceived mistreatments. The logic was that if it isn’t worth remembering,
it probably isn’t worth writing. Quite simply, most of what happens in
someone’s day isn’t worth remembering.

Since then I’ve danced a little closer to the edge of the personal and I’ve
had a few thoughts on what can be disclosed while hopefully keeping the site
from growing uninteresting. Essentially I think much of the problem of
detailing the personal is that the author allows him or herself to become
too esoteric. They quickly write names and places that are unfamiliar with
their audience and to whom the readers have formed no allegiance. This makes
people, ostensibly the prime movers of any story, non-descript scenery.

Furthermore, as these stories are occurring in the present tense, a
conclusion is usually lacking. No lesson has yet been learned, no conclusion
forthcoming. These are the petty dramas of one’s life. They’re about a
perceived slight by the water cooler or something of equally insignificant
magnitude. Basically, these stories are told without perspective or insight.

What I try to do when I tell a story, and I’m not saying I do it well, but I
try to use the personal and the people I’ve known to write stories about the
reader. I think that’s the way a good story is written. It isn’t about me or
the people in a story. Instead I think the writer, if he or she chooses to
be personal, should endeavour to write about universal things that most
every reader can relate too. In doing this, they may write a personal story,
but it’s personal to the reader as well as the writer. A good writer gifts
the reader a life they never had, but which they understand and relate to
implicitly. A good writer can tell a story about himself and make the reader
think of his or her own life and experiences. A good writer, in allowing
access to his own soul, helps the reader gain access to theirs.

So yes, do be personal. Please be personal. But don’t be selfish or
esoteric. Be inclusive and daring and maybe, just maybe, you’ll write
something worth reading, something worth remembering.