Focus! (on writing and blogging)

My recent post on “Poolboy, Tags, and Labels” developed from thoughts I’d mulled over concerning a (straw-man variety of) music theorist’s tendency to label musical events (think: a sonata’s purported “exposition, development, recapitulation”) without addressing the (to me) more interesting things like, say, process or meaning. I brought something personal–Poolboy, in this case–into the discussion as a way to focus the post. It’s a device I’ve been criticized for in some of my “scholarly” writing since it’s a slippery slope from the grudgingly accepted first-person authorial voice to the still (and in many cases rightly) academically unfashionable “testimony.” “Let me tell you how I feel,” is hard for some to swallow when it’s not masked behind a more impersonal “Let me tell you what is.” I won’t beat down a door that’s already been open: I hardly think there are too many of the old guard remaining on the lookout, ready to pounce on excessive use of the first person. (Digressing already, I wonder if I should blog in footnote style, with links to my tangents hosted on other pages. Perhaps I might now shift to a discussion of how hard it is to come up with an appropriate subject/agent for any given sentence when you’re describing how music moves ((or as music theorists once liked to say, “the music itself”))) ….

Focus. I think the rhetorical device worked in the Poolboy case–not to say it was great writing, but he held it together. With him as the main character in the post, it became easier to delete the (many) points I wanted to include but couldn’t. Blog-style writing is hard for me. I’m a fan of elaboration, and it’s hard for me to leave the tangents for the links …. …. Why am I writing this blog? Sure, it’s partly to connect ideas to each other and myself with others, to participate in a larger conversation. (or is it a smaller one?) I want to respond to my friends, while helping to shape the arguments that matter to me. More than this, it’s to help me

Focus. I’ve been working on a dissertation for a long time now. And well, it’s been oh-so-slow going since I gave up smoking just over two years ago. The end is still in sight, but it hasn’t been easy without the constant nicotine stimulant to help me

Focus. (Sorry, I’ll drop the modified Gwendolyn Brooks thang). The important thing about writing is that, like anything else, if you wanna do it you just have to do it. My intention was to work out ideas here on my blog, while hopefully getting some feedback. I’m a firm believer that the best feedback on academic writing often comes from people outside of your discipline and even academia. Even without feedback, however, at least I’d keep the gears grinding.

Unfortunately for my productivity, I started writing when the primary elections were in full swing, right when the smartest, most inspiring politician I’ve ever had the chance to support actually started to win this race. I was distracted.

Of course, there are millions of Obama posts out there, so I’ve been consciously speaking to a smaller, targeted audience of people who know me and, I hope, care what I think. I know, however, that’s not how you get feedback. You get feedback–I mean, “hits,” comments, links–by narrowing in on a targeted audience, participating in select, topical forums. Part of me wants to do acquiesce to the advice of this Blogger help page:

A good way to build an audience is to speak to one in particular. When you keep your audience in mind, your writing gains focus. Focus goes a long way toward repeat visitors…. Also, try to be descriptive when you blog. A well crafted post about something very specific can end up very near the top results of a search…. Strive for succinct posts that pump pertinent new information into the blogosphere and move on. Keep it short and sweet so visitors can pop in, read up, and click on.

Yeah, maybe not. Be it due to nature or nurture, I can’t help but resist the compartmentalization and specialization that would turn me into a better self-promoter. Ultimately, I’m writing this to learn to enjoy writing again. It’s now clear that writing is a much different process than it was with the constantly dangling cig. It takes longer, for one. Short, awkward bursts need to be channeled into something grander, or at least re-imagined as such. No one would golf 18 holes with only a putter, unless you had someone to talk with on the long, slow walk.

Ideology aside (neither of us are the ideologues we’re sometimes accused of being), I really enjoy reading Althouse. Just tonight I noticed my blog’s current tagline, “an audio theoretician’s glog, only sometimes concerning audio theory” is an obvious subliminal rip-off of “I‘m a law professor, and sometimes I write about law.” I hadn’t heard of Madison’s local/national blogger until I read this 2006 post (and many more like it) during the run-up to Wisconsin’s unfortunate “constitutional” ban on “gay marriage.” (By the way, those weren’t unnecessary quotation marks.) I was struck by the reasonableness of the debate (which she’d continue to moderate in the comments), even on points on which I strongly disagreed, which were few. I soon found I was curious about her thoughts on topics other than the political issues that initially drew me in. It’s better still when she pulls it together: like writing style and “retro-feminists“.

While we both (dare I say?) have excellent taste in cab companies, Althouse is unlike me in that she’s famous and highly paid. Expect my future posts to be more often about music.

And hopefully shorter.