Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Don't Write to Publish Every Day

A couple of years ago I wrote Maria Elena Salinas, Univision's talented and much admired anchor, a note arguing that she was taking a very simplistic approach in a column she wrote. I don't remember the topic now but I thought that she should have known better than to write what she did. A few days later, she wrote back saying that she had been attacked from both sides of the political spectrum and thus "I must be saying something right". I was reminded of that exchanged when I read about what one journalist calls the mainstream media's "Bipartisan Think" approach to reporting the news.  This approach assumes that "everyone" is equally responsible for the problems in Washington and the country, and that everyone has a legitimate or at least a right to have a different opinion on an issue and that both sides of the debate must be dealt with in a  balanced way. This can at times include balancing out a scientific pronouncement with a counter argument from an anti-science group.

This, of course, is ridiculous. Yet, it is becoming more common with the explosion of technology that allows anyone to write and comment on just about anything without having to take responsibility for their arguments. The media's fascination with reporting "all that is going on" bombards us with absurdities. The fact that people now do not write to their friends but to their "followers" means that words and ideas have become cheap and they now usually come as shots from the hip. Not knowing how to handle this explosion of "writings and commentaries" many in the media simply report as many of these sides as they can. This has allowed pundits from the left and the right to appear even though they have nothing serious or intelligent to offer. Twenty-four hour cable and computer live streaming add much to this morass of bad ideas.

But this instant messaging environment has also impacted some rather serious writers who do often have something important to say. Its just that no one, no matter how talented, has something serious and meaningful to say every day. One only has to study prolific writers of the past to realize that they agonized over every word and spent hours and even days going over what would become a permanent part of the public record. Computers might facilitate the writing, technology the venue, and one's name may attract the audience, but the process of saying something meaningful is still difficult no matter one's abilities. Yet, what writer shuns an invitation to be read (or seen reading) even if it is a self-created one with blogs, facebook, twitter, youtube, instagram, etc.? Now columnists who write several times a week have blogs and so do most anchor people and reporters.

There use to be a reason why one read people three times a week and not everyday. There is also a reason why there is time and space between great journalistic stories, or poems, short stories and novels. That time was meant to be spend perfecting the idea before it came out. Today, we are obsessed with reading from the same people everyday. That is why kids who blog their tragedies have hundreds of thousands of followers, and why animals have facebook pages. We no longer seek to get meaning from what we read but we actually create it in our own minds and project it unto what we read or in the case of Youtube see. How else would we explain a pig without hind legs having more followers that the president?

Part of this faddish obsession with blogs and facebook is that many people have lost a sense of community. We don't talk to our neighbors, spend time after church or work talking to people in the same space, and our families are spread throughout the continent. We often work in places where we are separated by cubicles or assignments and we don't have real human contact except for the "hi" and "see you laters" as we come in and leave. Digital writing allows us to communicate without really communicating and given that we only use short phrases, it also allows us not to think too deeply about what we are going to say. We can also make snide remarks on someone's post and know that no one is going to take the time to rebuttal what we say. They'll just make snide remarks back.

Blogs have spread rapidly through academia and now we have hundreds of them in all the genres that call themselves part of the intellectual pursuit. Periodically you find some bright idea and some good writing. Most of the time it is shallow material that is "part of a larger research project" and which is often meant to elicit praise for our work, or to test the waters to see how many sharks there are before we jump in. For young scholars it is a wonderful opportunity to write and develop ideas, but for actual learning they are a bad place to spend too much time in. Even most of the good postings are shallow.

Yet, for some scholars it is the only place to "publish" something given the nastiness of the publishing arena in academia. And, of course, ideas should not be the domain of those who control the means of publication. So my beef is not that people want to write or even with the venues which allows them to be published or read, it is with the notion that you can write and have something significant to say without putting much thought into it than what appears in the brain that morning after the coffee or the hard workout at the gym. I am troubled with the liberality with which we throw out words and ideas and then believe that their accummulation means that we have said something meaningful. I am troubled by people who trivialize their tragedies or happiness by detailing every minute and every day of their lives to strangers, and am troubled just as much with those who urge them on because they are obsessed with knowing what someone is feeling 3,000 miles away even though they might not even know their next door neighbor.

So, what should the role of the serious writer be? This I know will get me in trouble with the "its a free country, all-ideas are important" crowd. But here it goes nonetheless. We should take time to think about what we write, study it in our minds, reflect on its usefulness, write it, leave it for a day or two, edit and rewrite and ask ourselves again if there is a purpose to it. Once we feel confident that it does then we publish it. And then we keep wondering if we actually said something useful because the mark of a good writer and intellectual is that they are humble enough to realize that even in their best moments something important was left unsaid and something trivial was given too many words.

Now, I'm not speaking to the person who simply wants a public journal to be read by all, or someone who likes to chat with their friends and meet new ones. It is meant for the serious writer, the person seeking to contribute to the intellectual pursuit. After all, this is what this blog is about even when it fails to meet the standard that I have set for myself. Writing is a serious business and it cannot be cheapened by the abundance of publishing venues. I remember when I was editor of a small literary journal that writers would send material to me that they would not send to "important" journals believing that they were doing me a favor. They weren't going to waste their best work on my meaningless journal. But that is exactly what they were doing, wasting--my time, their time, my journal pages, and their own computer screens. Work that is not pruned and perfected--as much as it can be--should never see the light of day. It should be in a journal, in unpublished notebooks, in stashed away files, or in the trash bin. I don't know how many blog postings I have finished, reworked, left to ferment, only to be deleted. Why? Because not everything written is worthy of publication and not every work that creates attention or controversy is worth the screen it was written on.

Writing should be fun and seeing our work in print or on screen is motivating but we should be careful not to be lulled into thinking that everything that comes from our computer or pad and pencil is good, or that by simply writing we are getting better. I am reminded of something Phil Jackson, the famous Laker coach once said about Shaquil O'Neil who would shoot 200 free throws in practice to improve his terrible percentage:"He's just doing it wrong 200 tiimes a day". It wasn't the times he shot that needed to improve but his technique. When we write every day we can improve but when we publish every day we usually just repeat the same mistakes. That is one reason why Ernest Hemningway once said that all writers should be journalists--for the constant writing and deadlines--but not for too long or they'd become bad writers.