Join our newsletter!
Inspired? Would you like to see your name on this website and your book up on those bookshop shelves? This is where we bring you a round up of writing tips, ideas and hints. | On turning a blog into a blook |
|
By Fiona Robyn In 2005 I started writing a daily blog. Each day I’d record an ordinary event that caught my attenti0n – two pheasants grubbing for dropped seed under the bird feeder, an old woman talking to herself in the bus queue. I called each clot of words a ‘small stone’, as if I’d gone on a walk along the beach and chosen a stone to put in my pocket and take home. Three years later I’d accumulated almost a thousand of them. One of the joys of blogs is their immediacy. Anyone can sit at their lap-top, tap away at their keyboard, and send their thoughts out into the world at the click of a button. Publishing my small stones feels a bit like skipping flat pebbles across a lake – someone further along the shore might see my triple-skip, but if not it doesn’t matter, another one is coming along soon. There are a lot of words out in the blogosphere. Although there are a growing number of finely crafted, beautifully written blogs, on the whole the writing is more likely to be conversational, throwaway. Up-to-date and of-the-minute is king. Books are different. Once a manuscript has been magicked into a book, there is no turning back. No editing. You might be able to correct that dodgy spelling in a future edition, but what about all those people already holding the first edition in their hands? Unlike blogs, people usually pay to read a book – swapping their hard-earned cash for your words. The way you describe the sound of the rain, this small boy’s tantrum, the violent colour of rapeseed - all this becomes set in concrete. A part of you is frozen forever. Blog archives are rarely revisited, but a book is likely to be picked up more than once, even if it’s when the owner is moving house or donating it to a charity shop. A book takes up space. A book is made from a tree. Books have history. Books are sacred. Before I started working on my manuscript, I wasn’t sure if my small stones would stand up to scrutiny on the pages of a book. I couldn’t remember what I’d written, and whether it was any good. The process of reading through the archives was enlightening. I discovered a few themes I had expected, and several that I hadn’t. I knew I had written a lot about road-kill, and there were at least ten stones describing a variety of squashed animals. I know that I’m dazzled by colour, and that I like to write about food. What I didn’t realise is how drawn I am to lost characters – homeless men drinking super-strength lager in the graveyard, a thin girl pushing away on a bike with tears streaming down her face. I didn’t realise that I’d written about eating apple crumble for breakfast on three separate occasions. Many of the stones got chucked onto the ‘recycling’ pile straight away. I might have thought that bright yellow tulip was interesting at the time, but reading the words back only bored me. These discarded stones left me with a ‘so what?’ kind of feeling. The stones I kept were the ones that gave me a frisson of recognition. They were the ones that amused me, surprised me, or beguiled me with the sound of their words. From those I kept, only a small handful of stones remained unchanged. Most took a little polishing – a chop here, an extra word here, a more precise way of describing the feel of fur or the taste of lemons. I ended up with more than thirty stones belonging to each month of the year, and whittled them further so there was one for each calendar day. The next task was to put them in ‘order’. I cut the printed stones out and arranged them on the carpet, a month at a time. This one feels strong – I’ll start with that. This one could come next – the red of the poppies mirrors the red of the blood. But then what? And if I put this one here, there are two in a row about tomatoes – that’s no good. Shuffling sequences up and down, deciding how long to stick with a particular mood - getting to a final order for each month was as satisfying as finishing the hoovering. I produced the book myself using www.lulu.com, a self-publishing site, and so the next phase was to think about how the book would look. I thought about a design for the cover, and how I might arrange the stones onto the page. This bit is fun – gathering images and photos, discovering new artists, but it also tends to be frustrating – fiddling about with PDF files, trying to iron out glitches. And finally of course I needed to think about how people would find out about the book. I wrote blurbs, updated my website and blog, made a list of where I would send review copies, wrote a few articles (including this one), thought about doing a blog tour… So why would anyone spend money on my book, when they can read a fresh stone on my blog every day for free? I believe that people out there will want to invest in my stones because I believe that there are readers out there like me – people who are in love words, and who want to honour them. People who want to take a bunch of words out into the garden where they can glance up at the chaffinches between pages. People who want to curl up on the sofa in the evening without the weight of metal in their laps. I have faith in a human desire for something slower, something more concentrated, something that takes more effort than skim-reading blogs. Books demand that we pay proper attention to words, that we give them space to reverberate, to leave a taste in our mouths. Books might not last as long as words in cyberspace – they have a lifespan, they get forgotten at the back of bookshelves, their pages go yellow. Everything passes. But we hold our favourite books inside us for a long time. Our relationship with a particular book can even last a lifetime. I love blogs, and I love blogging, but don’t you dare try and take away my books. Read extracts and reviews of Fiona’s latest book at www.fionarobyn.com. Her blog continues at www.asmallstone.com. |
| Posted: 30/06/2008 15:05:59 |
Chick Lit > Writing Tips :: On turning a blog into a blook