BLOGOPHOBIA

I admit my heart sank when asked to write a blog.

I’ve never written one—and don’t read them. I’m a closet blog-o-phobe. The faddish term sums it up for me: “blob” combined with the word for dead wood, rhyming with “hog”. It promises to bore, buttonhole, and take up copious space on my crowded mental sofa.

I can’t help it. The massed global community of avid, dedicated, garrulous bloggers makes me want to be silent.

If this reaction seems alien and ungenerous; so be it. It’s probably related to my being a painfully slow writer with a tendency to get hypnotised by words, and hair-splitting distinctions of tone, colour, weight and meaning. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m a chronic re-writer of sentences and manuscripts. Not surprisingly, I don’t get much done. When writing a book, I eat, sleep, drink, and manage basic bodily functions. Email allows me to stay in touch with people who might otherwise assume I’ve died. Blogging is a non-starter.

When working on a novel, I’ll glance at news headlines, read the odd poem, watch a DVD, or listen to music. But I don’t read books, avoiding parallel fictional worlds–much as I’d not attempt to eat a rich meal and cook one simultaneously. Reading and writing are, for me, forms of digestion and assimilation.

Writers are—or should be—hyper-porous, so it’s essential to watch one’s influences and use of energy. It’s a bit like putting a red sock in a hot white wash, or listening to someone with a heavy Southern accent: the influence can be subtle, but before long, I’m pink, and come from Alabama.

My novel “One Thousand Chestnut Trees” involved an intensive distillation of facts and experience; adolescent memories, feelings about race and culture, and interpretation of the complex wars that shaped Korea. This filtering demanded patience, time and space incompatible with zingy web pursuits and their instant charms.

I’m glad that people have a powerful desire to connect and disseminate their views, and it’s wonderful that they have a platform. (What did they do before?—ed.) But sometimes it feels as if the tsunami of casual internet content threatens to engulf considered writing. I sound like a party-pooper, but perhaps there’s a saturation point past which blogging becomes a riptide of babble.

Despite hypocritically writing this now, I’m not much interested in my own views—a prerequisite for the born blogger. It must be fun, and vital in some way I can’t relate to. It’s old-fashioned, but I feel it’s a privilege to “be read”. With so much competition from other media it seems a miracle that people find their way to reading books; I only hope readers sense in my work that their attention matters.

The latest edition of Mira Stout’s One Thousand Chestnut Trees is out today.

Read more about blogging:

• Fuel Injected Dreams
• Blogging like its 1665