What if this is It?
I wrote a quick link dump of a blog post yesterday, pointing people toward Kunkel’s n+1 piece “Lingering” as well as Emily Gould’s excellent “Why I Write for Free.” Someone left a comment to the post wondering aloud wether the internet helped or hindered his creativity. (Click here to read the comments.) He seemed to come down, more or less, on the side of the internet hindering his creativity, and certainly, if you’re working on a novel or a script or something, there’s plenty on here to distract you from the task at hand.
But I didn’t entirely agree with him, so I decided to respond. As I was crafting a follow-up comment, it hit me that maybe this is it. Maybe the various blogs that I write are going to be all there is, creatively, for me. Maybe I’ll never finish that novel I’ve been working on, and maybe I’m okay with that. Hell, maybe the novel isn’t as good as my blog.
I don’t want to open the “Are blogs art?” argument, a discussion at least as tedious as “Are blogs criticism?” (no, actually far more tedious than that, I think), but I thought I’d throw it out there to Tumblr. I know some of you are working on other projects — books and films and songs and whatnot. What if you never do anything with them? What if your blog is all there is of you, creatively?
Would it be enough?
