At last night’s Manchester Blog Awards what was noticeable was how the “blog” is transforming, from personal experience to a genuine platform for new writing.
Even a year or so ago, the blogs that people sent you were almost always anecdotal – quirky tales of working in a call centre or even, memorably, travels on the “43” bus. What was noticeable last night is that there’s hardly a hair’s breadth anymore between the blog writer and the writer. Follow the Yellow Brick Road or Chicken and Pies could easily be the first chapter of an autobiographical novel – and with readings from two forthcoming novels, by Chris Killen and Maria Roberts, the journey from blog to page has never seemed shorter.
I think what is interesting is how a format that began as a semi-public “diary” now has almost no pretence about its pretension – the blogger is now craving an audience, and all last night’s readers were more accomplished than some more literary types I’ve seen over the years. In some ways, I’m wondering if this now, paradoxically, takes it away from “social media” into another realm. At its worst this type of writing is an ephemeral chick-lit for the noughties, at it’s best, a return to the ongoing episodic narratives of Richardson and Defoe. Either way, of course, the aim is to entertain; to make us laugh – to get us to return.
It’s always a hostage to fortune to say a format has “come of age”, but as someone who began blogging in HTML before I’d even heard of Blogger, I’d be surprised to find a young writer who now wasn’t putting out some of their work via a blog.
In the flurry of events that fills the calendar in Manchester at this time of year, one can see that the Blog Awards feels like a necessary piece of the city’s cultural furniture.
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Dim Sum Digital 
“It’s always a hostage to fortune to say a format has ‘come of age’, but as someone who began blogging in HTML before I’d even heard of Blogger, I’d be surprised to find a young writer who now wasn’t putting out some of their work via a blog.”
Can’t say I’m in that “young writer” category anymore, but had there been such a thing as a blog when I began pumping out words for their own sake, my life might have taken a different tack altogether. On the other hand, it’s never too late to be what you (or I, in this case) might have been.
It all works out in the end, no?
LikeLike
“It’s always a hostage to fortune to say a format has ‘come of age’, but as someone who began blogging in HTML before I’d even heard of Blogger, I’d be surprised to find a young writer who now wasn’t putting out some of their work via a blog.”
Can’t say I’m in that “young writer” category anymore, but had there been such a thing as a blog when I began pumping out words for their own sake, my life might have taken a different tack altogether. On the other hand, it’s never too late to be what you (or I, in this case) might have been.
It all works out in the end, no?
LikeLike
“It’s always a hostage to fortune to say a format has ‘come of age’, but as someone who began blogging in HTML before I’d even heard of Blogger, I’d be surprised to find a young writer who now wasn’t putting out some of their work via a blog.”
Can’t say I’m in that “young writer” category anymore, but had there been such a thing as a blog when I began pumping out words for their own sake, my life might have taken a different tack altogether. On the other hand, it’s never too late to be what you (or I, in this case) might have been.
It all works out in the end, no?
LikeLike