Michael Blowhard has an interesting post about why he prefers personal blogs over personal memoir:
I’m generally annoyed by book-length memoirs, on the grounds of “If I know you, sure, maybe I’ll be interested. But otherwise your life better make for a mighty good story, otherwise why exactly should you expect me to care?”
These days, though, I often find myself fascinated by bloggers who pause to think out loud about some of what they’ve lived through. Honesty, the personal touch, modesty — what’s not to enjoy? (And what’s not to respect?)
As I pointed out to him in the comments, I’ve generally found the opposite to be true. Michael gives some spectacular examples of amazing personal blog posts in his post, but even with excellent personal/reflective blogs, I find myself boring of them relatively quickly.
With a well-done memoir, the author is really writing a novel about his or her own life (and of course, many “novels” are simply memoirs with all the names changed). The plot is just as tightly crafted, and characterization, setting, and all those other things that go into a good story are just as carefully done. In fact, I prefer memoir to novel: I guess I’m a sucker for the “this is real” aspect of memoir; I often can’t get past the “made up” part of fiction.
So what does make a good blog? Well, the writing, certainly. And there must be something of the personal there as well: you must get a sense of a human behind all the postings. I’m entertained by a blog like Old Hag, but because the language there is so affected, it’s not as compelling as something like Political Animal, where, though the writing isn’t as good, Kevin Drum’s personality comes through in nearly every post. I’d put 2Blowhards in this category as well. I also like the fact that these blogs are about something. It’s not that I don’t very much enjoy more self-centered blogs such as John Scalzi’s, it’s more that I have a sense of the type of posting I can expect when I visit Political Animal. It’s more like a memoir: the “plot” is politics, and I can see Drum’s position adapt and meld with current events. (I should point out, by that measure, that I wouldn’t like my own blog. I’m a little too scattered to interest myself. Sure, there are common threads, but I’m just not as consistent as someone like Drum. I’ve done a lot of posts about literature and criticism lately, but someone looking for a lit blog would likely be disappointed by my offerings on a long-term basis.)
I have written a memoir, but I haven’t been able to interest a publisher in it yet. They say these things take time — and I probably haven’t been as persistent as I could be pursuing publishers and agents — but perhaps the real difficulty is exactly what Michael Blowhard says: “why exactly should you expect me to care?” Why should anyone care about my life? They shouldn’t, except for one thing: there’s a human behind the story. Just as blogs are more interesting when the personality of the writer comes through, memoirs are interesting because we can extrapolate the personality of the author through the events he or she recounts. I hope that’s what mine does, anyhow.