Despite what Steve Martin says in one of my favorite ever Shouts & Murmurs ("Writing is Easy!"), Michael Chabon is cowed not only by writing, but also by bloggin'! He was filling in for Ta-Nehisi Coates on his blog at The Atlantic and sums up his week of blogging thusly:
Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday
[caption id="attachment_2116" align="alignright" width="224" caption="I can juggle while I type, I am juggling and typing--both. At the same time."]
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afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs. You find novelists going over and over the same ground in their novels—TNC was talking about Gatsby last week, Fitzgerald's a prime example—configuring and reconfiguring the same little set of preoccupations, haunted by missed opportunities. That may be because getting a novel written, or a bunch of novels, means that you are going to miss a lot of opportunities, and so missing them is something you have to be not only willing but also equipped by genes and temperament to do. Blogging, I think, is largely about seizing opportunities, about pouncing, about grabbing hold of hours, events, days and nights as they are happening, sizing them up and putting them into play with language, like a juggler catching and working into his flow whatever the audience has in its pockets.
Now, being a beleaguered blogger when you're Michael Chabon is something. Feeling beleaguered when you're me? Maybe even more impressive for the lack of literary preeminence to serve as ironic contrast. Prolific bloggers out there, tell us: What is your secret? (By "us," I mean Michael Chabon and me... and maybe a few others.)
--aed
