Metablog – Breaking the Code

As I have begun to get into this blogging business a bit, I have been struggling to understand how it’s really supposed to work. It’s definitely a form of communication with its own unique challenges….

It’s kind of like a diary, but there’s at least a theoretical chance that someone else will read this – so while I intend to be honest, it may be best not to be “nakedly” self-revelatory!

On the other hand, if it actually were a two-way conversation, that conversation would be informed by the relationship between me and the other party. You change the way you communicate based on who’s listening, but if you don’t know who’s listening, how do you set the style?

Even a work of fiction has its own internal logic and conventions, and as you read through, you hopefully come to understand the characters and watch them progress. However, even if you assume there are readers, they can jump in (and out) anywhere – in fact, they don’t necessarily even read them in the order you intend. So, pretty hard to shoot for "character development".

I’m not sure that many of the blogs I’ve scanned have given this concept (or anything else, but that’s another story) a lot of thought. I have to think that if I’m going to do this at all, it ought to be worth doing right. I just hope I eventually figure out what that looks like.

When I write our family's annual Christmas letter, I always have to keep in mind that it's the family's Christmas letter, not just mine. That means I am not always free to say everything that comes to mind, in whatever style I wish. If it were all me, it would be about 50% puns and wry observations. And, of course, my vocabulary tends to be a bit... I don't know, florid? Baroque? I have to admit that I come from the school of, "if a 50-cent word is good, a two-dollar word is better." In some circles that's seen as showing off, but really I just find it amuses me. In this I am following in the footsteps of some of my favorite funny writers such as Twain, Thurber, and PJ O'Rourke.

So one thing I have determined about writing this is that I'm going to indulge my own unique word sense to the hilt. They say you should "write for yourself", and since it's probably myself I'm writing for anyway, I have nothing to lose.