Blogging: Art vs. Commerce

I have a few blogging friends that I can count on when I need a vent session, and unfortunately I didn’t get to see enough of them on this most recent trip, so I have to take my angst and spill it here.

I kid, I kid. Mostly. After ten years of blogging (oh gosh typing that makes me feel ANCIENT) I have a pretty quick turnaround from when I register something rude or unpleasant happening to when I’m dusting it off my shoulders. Blogging is awesome and I’m obviously a more fervent convert than most if I’ve stuck it out this long, but whenever I go to a trade show or conference, it always brings blogging into harsh contrast. The good parts are heavenly and make me want to start a commune, the bad parts are hell and make me look for something handy to burn to the ground.

Whenever you deal with people who work on the internet you’re going to have some weird encounters. Usually people who work online work there for a reason, and bringing that out into meatspace can have some interesting results. Plus you add free drinks and a bunch of people who are there to sell themselves as experts in one thing or another, and you’re going to get a lot of opinions you didn’t ask for.

I’ve been getting this from the very beginning. The truth is that if I only wrote about Atticus, or only wrote about crafts, or food, or whatever, I’d be more successful. If what you define as success is the number of hits your blog gets. And going to these conferences it’s really really (really really really) easy to get caught up in thinking that how easily google can find what you write, and how few words you can use to describe what you do, is what makes you a good blogger.

There comes a point in every SEO conversation where I find myself just going limp and nodding along, waiting for the barrage to be over, trying to ignore the advice that tells me I’m doing everything wrong and if I want readers everything has to be smaller and more easily digestible and listicles and bullet points. I try to tell myself that it’s not that these people are wrong, exactly, they certainly have the traffic to prove their point, it’s just that none of that feels like it applies to me.

I’m an old-school blogger, and in my day, we told stories. And that’s still what I have to offer. Even if the story I’m telling that day is why I decided to make a puffy jacket Christmas ornament. Watching the hits come into my stat tracker doesn’t move me like telling a story does, and stories aren’t just made up of keywords.

I was on the phone with Bear while I was away, telling him about a few encounters I had where SEO came up, people wanted to talk numbers, and how that made me feel. I was struggling to try and find a way to explain how I felt like my mission was different without disparaging other bloggers. Because some of the bloggers I admire most are MASTERS at SEO and have filled a niche like it was a memory foam mattress. I don’t think there needs to be a value judgment in approaches to blogging, even if it’s a way that is different than mine. Bear said to me, “It’s almost like what you’re trying to do is an art, and what they’re trying to do is business.” It wasn’t a perfect analogy, but it solved the problem for me.

It *is* like what I’m trying to do is an art, but it also is a business. And every other blogger is doing it that way too. So let’s look at another artform: novel writing.

Lately I can’t read enough Anne Lamott. No matter what is going on on the page I find tears at the corner of my eyes just because I recognize my reality in her words. I love her and I will fight anyone who tries to make her change a dreadlock on her head. But she doesn’t sell as many books as Tom Clancy. They don’t make movies out of everything she writes like Elmore Leonard. If those were the only criteria for being a good novelist, my beloved Anne would be out in the cold. But lucky for me publishing houses recognize that not everyone needs to be Tom Clancy. Anne Lamott can be recognized as a great novelist on her own terms.

Blogging doesn’t seem to be there yet. We have the odd award or showcase for quality writing, but other than that we just hear the drumbeat of SEO and statistics. As an industry we largely recognize the commerce, but not the art. And trade shows and conferences are ALL about the commerce. It’s just that the way things are done are unsatisfying to me. I’d like to have a bigger audience, just like anybody, but not at the expense of how I’m doing things. For me, there’s no joy in that route.

So I guess I’ll just continue being stubborn and blogging my own way. I’ll be Ani DiFranco when everyone else says I’d do better if I was Katy Perry. I’ll go to the conferences to try and learn tricks I can bend to my blog, and not bend my blog to the tricks, and because, every once in a while, I meet someone who gets me. I meet a reader, or another lone blogger drifting out in this wild west, and it gives me the incentives I need to keep going. Until someday, when bloggers will get that there’s more than one way to blog. Or I get a book deal. Either one.

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