From Word To Word

I am guilty, I think, of wanting to put writing in its place.  At least, I am guilty of wanting to put it into the places that the literary world has traditionally tended to put it.  Though I find myself comfortable with publishing certain modes of writing though the medium of the blog, for example, there are other modes that I have assumed to be out of place in this medium.  The short essay seems a natural fit for the blog, of course, as does the news article, the personal reflection, and even the poem.  Longer prose, however, especially book-length works that would need to be serialized, do not obviously lend themselves to the restrictions of a blog, and I have always assumed that their place was elsewhere.

I recently had this assumption challenged, however, when I was mentioning to a friend of mine that I wanted to post some of my longer prose on the web but that I was not looking forward to the hassle of maintaining yet another webspace.  She asked, innocently enough, why I did not just post this stuff on my blog.  When I tried to argue that it was too long, she pointed out the very long history of serialized writing in English literature.  When I reminded her that I found most of this tradition tedious and verbose, she told me that my prose style seemed a perfect match.  I submitted, as I almost always do, to her superior force of argument.

So, while I still have some reservations about the idea of posting longer prose in the medium of the blog, I will be experimenting with this possibility to a degree.  I will begin with some existing creative pieces that are fairly short in any case.  I will also try posting some chapters from a still incomplete children’s novel that I am writing, since its chapters are also quite short.  Depending on the success of these experiments, I might begin posting other things as well.

It may be, of course, that my assumptions will be justified and that a blog will not be convenient for these kinds of writing.  In the worst case, however, I need only to delete the experimental posts and pretend that they never existed.  I have never been beyond a little historical revisionism, particularly when my own pride is at stake, so I am prepared, for the moment, to be writing out of place.