What Would Hemingway Think About Blogs?
I’ve been slowly working my way through The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 1 which my mother gave me for Christmas in 2006. I recently read the interview with Ernest Hemingway. Without waxing too poetic about how amazing it must have been to sit down with such a legend (just reading what he says, verbatim feels like an honor), I’ll highlight one quote that caught my eye:
“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once it is written you have to stand by it.”
I’d like to take that quote and break it into two parts to address it. First of all, you have the fun of talk part. “Papa” hit the nail on the head with that one. When I walk out of a movie, finish a book, have a weird dream or get done writing an article or a post, the first thing I want to do is talk about it. It’s how I decompress and explore all the various and sundry thoughts milling about in my head.
The second part of the statement is what really caught my eye though. Exploring an idea through writing and all the different angles people take on it is what I do for a living.
Partially, I think he’s correct. Some of what one thinks should not be written down. Putting thoughts out into the blogsphere willy-nilly, as so many bloggers do, may quickly drive up traffic to your site because you make such controversial or unpredictable comments. That may be good in the short run, but even with the immediate nature of the Web, we still need to think in the long term about our virtual actions.
You may find that you’ve re-thought the premise of a post so you take it down or edit it. But other people agreed (or disagreed) with what you had to say, and put it up on their blogs with credit and a link pointing back to you. Now you’re aligned with that thinking for all of that site’s readers.
Turns out Papa was right.
Or was he? Part of the beauty of blogging is that when I write and post a thought, I consider it only one statement in a conversation. So often I take something that someone else wrote and jump off from there. In the hopes that they and others will see what I think and respond, I give a link back (I’m also giving credit of course). The point is to push conversation forward.
So maybe Papa would have changed his mind had he ended up blogging (which is not something I could see him doing, but hopefully you see my point). Had he lived, maybe it would be him reading this collection of interviews and he would have been moved to announce his change of heart in a blog post, albeit carefully.
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