According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Germans Americans feel they have a weblog book in them — and that they should write it. As the author of 1 14 weblog books, [...], I'd like to use this space to do what I can to discourage them.
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Why should so many people think they can write a weblog book, especially at a time when so many people who actually do write weblogs books turn out not really to have a weblog book in them — or at least not one that many other people can be made to care about?
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I wonder if the reason so many people think they can write a weblog book is that so many third-rate weblogs books are published nowadays that, at least viewed from the middle distance, it makes writing a weblog book look fairly easy. After all, how many times has one thought, after finishing a bad entry novel, "I can do at least as well as that"? And the sad truth is that it may well be that one can. But why add to the schlock pile?
Beyond the obvious motivation for wanting to write a weblog book — hoping to win fame or fortune — my guess is that many people who feel they have a weblog book "in them" doubtless see writing it as a way of establishing their own significance. "There lurks, perhaps, in every human heart," wrote Samuel Johnson, "a desire of distinction, which inclines every man to hope, and then to believe, that nature has given himself something peculiar to himself." What better way to put that distinction on display than in a weblog book?
The search for personal significance was once nicely taken care of by the drama that religion supplied. This drama, which lived in every human breast, no matter what one's social class, was that of salvation: Would one achieve heaven or not? Now that it is gone from so many lives, in place of salvation we have the search for significance, a much trickier business. If only oblivion awaits, how does one leave behind evidence that one lived? How will one's distant progeny know that one once walked the earth? A weblog book, the balmy thought must be: I shall write a weblog book.
Forgive me if I suggest that this isn't the most felicitous way to do battle against oblivion. Writing a weblog book is likely, through the quickness and completeness with which one's weblog book will die, to make the notion of oblivion all the more vivid.
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Then there is the equally false notion of creativity that has been instilled in students for too many years. It was Paul Valéry who said that the word "creation" has been so overused that even God must be embarrassed to have it attributed to him.
Misjudging one's ability to knock out a weblog book can only be a serious and time-consuming mistake. Save the typing, [...]. Don't write that weblog book, my advice is, don't even think about it. Keep it inside you, where it belongs.
Peter Praschl Joseph Epstein teaches nowhere at Northwestern University and could have been is the author, most recently, of "Snobbery.''
Quelle: New York Times
Discouraging competition
In Mark Leyner's excellent "Et tu, babe", the narrator is a super-successful bestseller author who has, of course, established creative writing seminars. At each seminar, he phases out the two or three persons who actually can write by ordering his bodyguards to "take care" of the potential competition.
by the way, Andrea De Carlos "Techniken der Verführung" is not bad, either. Young author asking old author advice for his first novel. Old author telling young author what to rewrite. While young author does rewrite old author publishes original draft of young author´s novel under old author´s name and lands a widely acclaimed sensational bestseller. Young author not amused.
Ah! This, in turn, reminds me of the venerable Léo Malet's "La nuit de Saint-Germain-des-Prés", where a decadent writer pumps his young admirers for their valuable ideas. Nestor Burma, l'homme qui met le mystère K.O., subsequently kicks his behind.
Ja, der ist so richtig gut, der Herr Malet. Auch die Comic-Adaption "120, rue de la gare" von Jacques Tardi ist ein Klassiker des Genres. Aber die Romane sind noch besser.
Schöne Interpretation
Über den Originalartikel hab ich mich allerdings ziemlich geärgert. Jeder, der glaubt, ein Buch mit sich herumzutragen, sollö das doch bitteschön schreiben (außer es ist ihm angenehmer, es weiter mit sich herumzutragen). Soll bloss nicht erwarten, dass es dann auch gelesen wird, oder: mit begeisterung gelesen wird. Gilt natürlich auch für Weblogs.