I’ve been writing this blog for the better part of five years and I’ve blogged about everything but, um, blogging.
Those who say ‘blogging is not writing, it’s graffiti with punctuation’ have never seen me with a can of spray paint and a semicolon. I've always believed that blogging isn't about focusing real hard and thinking about what to write as much as it’s making your mind blank and typing whatever comes to mind.
There are a few ways to achieve this: 1) don’t sleep for three days and then try to write 2) try to write with an attractive woman bending over in front of you 3) drink lots of caffeine. Like a drunk ranting to a stranger on the next bar stool, blogging is about just letting it all out unscripted, uncensored, uninhibited, and unfrittered.
Blogging was invented by college student Johnson C. Blog who hated writing term papers. After taking the 311 words of actual relevant material he’d written and trying to extend it to fill 12 pages by making the margins wider than a WalMart parking lot, he changed his strategy and wrote just to write and fill up space. And the technique of writing just to write was named after him; it was called a Johnson. No seriously; it was forever to be known as a blog in his honor.
Blogging has evolved since the days of Johnson C. Blog. Those who think bloggers are these classically trained individuals who have worked hard at their craft and sharpened their wit in a fancying display of verbal swordsmanship, are not far from the truth. But blogging is an art form which is 50% talent, 50% inspiration, and 10% hard work.
To be a successful blogger, one must first master the tangent. A tangent is a way of adding something random and quite unrelated just to fill space and increase your word count. Then the tangent circles back to reinforce the original point to somehow make it all seem relevant on a shoestring of logic even though the two are entirely unrelated thus giving the appearance of command over your topic.
Blogging is a way to avoid work and actually believe you’re being productive; it’s the straightening of the deck chairs on the Titanic of the literary world. It is the Twinkie of the literary forms: it looks sweet and tastes good going down but leaves you feeling empty and fat and sloppy so you make excuses to everyone because you’re out of shape and you have to wear sweatpants everyday explaining that they’re comfortable and you'll be back in the gym in no time which really means never as you have no time.
As a blogger you should never say in five words what you could say in fifty-five words or more. I stumbled onto this with the speeches of William Jefferson Blythe Curly Clinton Jr. the III. The first two hours of a two hour and ten minute speech would have President Bill thanking everyone one for their attendance: “… and thank you for the traffic light that was green on the way over here tonight not that it would have mattered since I’m the President of the United States and I don’t have to yield to traffic signals. And for the people who stayed home so I could get here faster, I truly thank you. You are great Americans and the state of the union is strong.”
Lawyers and bloggers have a lot in common when it comes to rambling which is the same reason why I don’t read law blogs. Part of the bar exam tests your competency with being a wordsmith. You have to prove that you have nine different ways of saying the same thing, and then say it so it appears that you’re saying something intelligent although no one who speaks English can decipher it. Read a mutual fund prospectus for examples of this.
In conclusion, I’d like to summarize by wrapping up and saying that in order to be a successful blogger, you have to: 1) write about nothing 2) add to that nothing with more nothing 3) stray from the nothing with unrelated tangents 4) write about former President and Chief William Jefferson Clinton III 5) write about sex 6) have pictures of scantily clad women to post.
So I’ve finally written about writing and the art of writing and that concludes this week’s posting. So until next week, I’ll just be here working on my Johnson blog.
