A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit a class at St. Joseph’s University, which happens to be my alma mater. Sam Starnes, who invited me, used to review for me when I was the book editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He wanted me to talk to his students about reviewing.

What I had to say was the less interesting part of the visit. The more interesting part was the questions the students asked. The students were smart and so were their questions. I got the distinct impression that young people today have more poise and are more sophisticated than the students of my generation were.

A particularly interesting question was posed, however, not by a student, but by Tenaya Darlington, an assistant professor at the university who had decided to sit in on the class. She asked what effect blogging had had on my writing.

I can’t recall now the free-associative response I gave to her question, but I’m pretty sure I mentioned something Somerset Maugham says in his quasi-autobiography The Summing Up: “You cannot write well unless you write much.”

If there is any benefit to be derived from blogging it starts with the doing of it. Writers write. Blogging is a good way of finding out if you have what it takes to sit down at regular intervals and write something. For someone like me, who already has deadlines to meet, it’s a good way to start the work day, like practicing scales.

Maugham’s point, of course, is a variation on Emerson’s dictum that “skill to do comes of doing.” The more you write — the more you do anything — the better you get at it.

But I have continued to think of the question Professor Darlington posed — usually, when I sit down to blog in the morning — because there’s a larger answer to it than I provided that afternoon at St. Joe’s.

One thing is that the more you write a particular kind of thing, the more your writing in general is going be characterized by the kind of thing you write. When it comes to writing, I am a natural sprinter, not a long-distance runner. Years of turning out pieces of roughly 750 words in length have only reinforced that tendency.

My blog largely consists of links to things I have read or been alerted to that I think others might want to look at. Often, but not always, I offer up a take on what I’m linking to. I may also quote what I think of as a key point in the piece.

I go to some trouble to keep these commentaries short and to the point. This may be because I am an aphorist manqué. Or because of other years spent writing headlines and captions. Whatever the reason I have become acutely aware — and this has coincided with my blogging — of when something I am reading seems longer than it need be.

When I link to something, I try to be aware of what in particular about it grabbed my attention, and what I try to do in my commentary is address that specifically as briefly as possible. I routinely remind myself of the initial query before diagramming a sentence: What or whom am I talking about?

So blogging, oddly enough, has reinforced my natural tendency toward economy in writing. I say “oddly” because there is nothing about writing online that would seem to make this necessary. You can keep writing away indefinitely in the hope that people will keep scrolling indefinitely.

I suspect that is a vain hope. There seems to me — and I know I am not alone in this — a natural limit to what can be comfortably read at one sitting on a screen. Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence seems to me to have hit upon the optimum length for a blog post.

Usually shorter is both better and harder — unless you have a natural talent in the other direction. For there are writers who are the literary equivalent of marathoners — Dickens, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Trollope, and Thomas Mann, to name just a few.

The scene in Anna Karenina where Levin cuts the meadow is a perfect example of how such a writer can go on at length economically. I wouldn’t cut a word out of that episode. I don’t think there is anything superfluous in it.

Were such a writer to blog, I suspect he would take advantage of the opportunity for writing indefinitely and do it in such a way that we would keep reading.

In my case, I do what Maugham says all writers should do — make a virtue of one’s limitations. And so, now that I have thought about it, the more precise answer to Professor Darlington’s question is that blogging has given me a better sense of literary economy. I know better now the proportions I can best manage. And I can appreciate better the scale that some others can attain.

It’s not that I didn’t know any of this before. It’s rather that by sitting down first thing every morning to blog I am daily reminded of it.

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

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