blog | Literature and Libation

Why Blog?

December 2, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

This post is part of a prompt from my fellow Mid-Atlantic beer bloggers. The idea is to get introspective, take some time as we hide under blankets from winter’s chill to think about how blogging (or writing about beer in general) has changed, or influenced, or mangled our relationship with the beer itself.

I’m going to argue that this blog hasn’t changed my relationship with beer.

It has changed my relationship with everything.

When talking writing, blogging, or any unpaid word mining and sentence smithing, the same question always seems to sneak out: why do it? Why spend so many hours, so much energy, keeping a digital journal of your thoughts and stories? It’s a legitimate query, and one that doesn’t always have a good answer. Blogging (well) involves more work than most people realize, and unless you win the internet lottery and ride the viral train to hits-town, there’s often very little return on investment (especially if you’re measuring said ROI in actual dollars).

So if not for fame or fortune, why? Writing can be its own reward, a cathartic outlet, a salvage yard for ideas not meant for commercial consumption. But there’s more, something fundamental, something formative in creating and curating your own online space.

Like a symbiotic organism attached to your parietal lobe, your blog alters your brain chemistry, slowly changing how you view the world. Experiences aren’t just one-offs anymore, they’re potential stories, or lessons, or photo-ops. The blog nudges you, encourages you, reminds you to dig deeper, to pull as much viscera from the everyday as you can without killing the poor thing. As it grows, you grow, teaching you just as much as you’ve taught it. The jumble of HTML and CSS behind a URL is more than just the sum of its pages, of its posts. It becomes an extension of you, a tangible and important aspect of your life like a digital pet who needs your love and attention.

Long car ride chats about sociology and philosophy lead to Eurekas and light bulbs, followed shortly thereafter by the powerful declarative, “that’s a blog post.” Simple conversations with new friends offer new perspectives. The blog overhears and records, for later use. After some time it takes partial control of your eyes, showing you details overlooked before, angles and blind spots obscured by privilege or naivety. Given more time it moves to your ears, filtering, noticing, listening for what matters in a multimedia cacophony of what doesn’t. Eventually, even your mouth will succumb, asking questions the blog wants answered, promoting, teaching, rambling at the behest of the ever-whirring gizmo inside your mind.

Running this blog rewired my brain. Rejected the old reality and injected a new one. It made me more attentive, more detail-focused, more interested in the whys and whos behind the whats, because the blog is picky, and will only eat the finest of meaty knowledge.

So of course, despite my earlier statement, this blog has changed my relationship with beer. But not only beer, and not because that’s what I write about most often. It changed the relationship with the drink because it changed me, forced me to see the poetry in the prosaic, the delicate dance happening between hop and water and malt. Beer is just a medium; it could have been anything. It just so happens I really like fermentation. The blog found the beer, not the other way around.

So why blog? Because it gives you a reason, a catalyst, to take a different look at the world. You do it for the constant creative companion to your inevitable individual evolution. You don’t run a personal blog for celebrity or cash (although if you’re lucky those things may come in time), you do it for you, to mature, to teach yourself, to grow.

Scroll yet further southward for the other posts on this prompt:

Josh from Short on Beer: Beer blogging has ______ my relationship with beer.
Douglas from Baltimore Bistros & Beer: Beer Blogging and My Relationship With Beer
Bryan from This Is Why I’m Drunk: It’s My Relationship and I Can Cry if I Want To
Jake from Hipster Brewfus: Verbose Validation of Verbage
Liz from Naptown Pint – Which came first, the beer or the blogging?

Ten Thousand Hours, Five Million Words

April 30, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I’ve watched my writing grow from ink-eyed youthful innocence, to awkward adverb-heavy pubescence, to logical, reasonable, rhetorical adult. He’s grown strong and independent and I’m pretty proud of him. And yet, as he tries to go off into the world, I’ve had a hard time letting go of his hand. He thinks he’s ready enough, old enough, brave enough to face the cruel world of the internet and rejection letters. I, his creator and biggest supporter, am not so sure. Part of me thinks he’s ready, even at times knows he’s ready, while another part of me thinks he’s a naive little boy who doesn’t know what he’s getting himself into.

I often have this notion that my writing is not quite “there yet” like a relentlessly questioning 8-year-old kid near the end of a cross-country road trip. But therein lies the problem: “there” (wherever it is) is nebulous, gelatinous. It’s damn near impossible to put into concrete terms. When does a writer know his or her writing is strong enough to compete and standout in the the great ocean of text? When can I, with confidence, turn around in my driver’s seat and tell my writing that we have officially arrived at our destination?

To appease my ever-pestering left brain, I decided to try to quantify my progress. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell describes the “10,000 hour rule,” the idea that if a person dedicates 10,000 hours to working on something, be it art, or business, or craft, they can become a master of that thing. Ten thousand hours. That’s 4.8 years of working standard, boring 40 hour work weeks. Or 416 straight days, no food, no rest, and no sign of your quarry but what bare page can tell.

How can a writer truly quantify hours spent “writing” when the art itself involves reading, thinking, note-taking, revision, editing, doodling, coffeeing, interneting, researching, and socializing? There’s only one way I can think of: word count. Those words that are finally committed to the page, even during a first draft, are usually the result of all your extra-writing activities. In theory, if you wrote at a moderate pace of 500 words an hour, you’d have to write 5,000,000 words to reach the coveted 10,000 hour mark. Five million hand-picked, deliberate word choices, all meticulously placed and replaced, chained together to create your art.

WordPress is an awesome tool and I often sing its praises from the mountaintop in my free time. But it lacks a way to easily compile a collective word count for your entire blog, even if you export the XML and try to parse it out. So over the past few months, through painstaking reviews of each post, I collected word counts and built my own word count tracking tool:

Literature and Libation Spreadsheet: (Now with 100% more numbers)

This sheet contains all of my posts, the categories they were published in, the dates they were published, whether they were fiction or nonfiction, and the word counts for each. I plan to one day add the hits, comments, and likes for each post, but just the idea of doing that right now makes me want to go to bed and sleep through my alarm.

I recognize that this is an incredibly nerdy and boringly analytic thing to do, but it has given me a way to tangibly track my writing progress, see how far I’ve come in terms of frequency of posting and other metrics. It has shown me how many words I write on average (750.28), what time of the year I write the most (Summer), how often I post about certain topics (too often), and just how OCD I am about organizing things in my life (very). It is a lasso I’ve thrown around the charging bull of my writing, in an attempt to slow it down so I can take a closer look.

But more importantly, this spreadsheet, with all of its hard data and shiny numbers, has shown me just how much I’ve written. And how much more I have left to write. The squiggly JELL-O of my progress suddenly has some form, like it’s been sitting in the fridge all these years slowly firming, each blog post a little piece of apple or orange suspended in the green goo of my career. There are nearly 200,000 words written across the loose pages of CSS and HTML that make up this blog; 200,000 words that I spent time choosing, orienting, crafting, and typing.

200,000 is only four percent of 5,000,000. But that’s four percent in the right direction. Four percent more than I had two years ago. Four percent that feels like four hundred.

When it feels like you’re writing and writing and writing but nothing is happening, take some time to see just how much you’ve written. Think about what you’ve learned from every sentence, remember that your voice is more than just the sum of your word counts. Every single word you type puts you one five-millionth closer to mastering your style. Remember that you are making progress, one idea, one letter, one word at a time.

“Practice isn’t the thing you do when you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”
― Malcolm Gladwell

Craft and Draft: Books As Diet

July 12, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I am haunted by the ghost of Jack LaLanne; his ethereal form jogs along side me, offering unsolicited, frankly terrifying fitness advice. His ecotplasm shudders and shifts as he tells me about correct form. Sometimes, late at night, I think I see his specter doing leg raises at the very edges of my periphery.

Before he leaves, he always tells me his favorite quote: “Exercise is King, nutrition is Queen, put them together and you’ve got a kingdom.”

Thanks, Jack. Sleep well sweet, fit prince. But seriously, leave me alone.

If my blog is my gym, then my books are my diet. They are the fuel for my writing, the literary calories that I ingest so that I can burn them off through vigorous finger movement.

Like normal, people food, not all books are created equal. Some are healthy, some are unhealthy. Some make you feel good, some make you feel bad. Some sharpen your mind to a perfect, number two pencil point, some turn it into a pile of amorphous goo, hardly capable of ordering something off of the dollar menu.

The key is moderation. It’s OK to cook up a burger with big thick Twilight patties, smothered in a fat-laden sauce made entirely of puréed Call of Duty fan-fiction. Just don’t do it all the time. Balance it out with a nice salad of mixed Susan Orlean with Joan Didion dressing. A nice George R.R. Martin smoothie topped with Tolkien berries makes for an excellent boost to your creative immune system.

Much like the old adage, “you are what you eat” the books that you read shape your mind and your skill. You will start to emulate whatever you read, subconsciously, whether good or bad. Much like your hot, toned body will become a sagging ruin after too many plates of bacon cheese fries, your mind will become an insipid, trite mess if you only feed it plot holes, bad grammar, and inconsistent characterization.

“You are what you read.”

Whatever you read, be critical. Train your eyes to find what is working, but also what is grinding the entire piece to a halt. Question assertions, look for substantiation. Don’t take anything at face value (Mitt Romney is a werecrocodile? I’d like to see some sources, mister). The more active you are when you read, the faster you’ll find what makes good writing good. And the faster you’ll be able to replicate it in your own writing. And the faster you’ll be fabulously rich and famous, doing book signings at Books-A-Million on the weekends.

Most importantly (if you are a writer) you have to write just as much as your read. The very basic principle for losing weight is “calories in < calories out.” It’s nice to sit and read and gather hundreds upon thousands upon millions of great ideas, but if you never sit down and commit them to Word doc, they’ll remain ideas until your brain decides it doesn’t need them any more. Or until you drink one too many beers on a Friday night.

Jack LaLanne was secretly a writing teacher. All of his advice about fitness and nutrition is applicable to our craft as well.

Make your blog workouts count. Read well.

Build little libraries everywhere. Don’t actually eat any books. You’ll probably get pretty sick.