Is Blogging the New Letter Writing?

For many writers, getting started is the biggest hurdle.  It is why I like to suggest to my would-be writer friends that blogging may be an effective exercise.  I treat blogging like a first draft of an idea, and this article about the lost art of letter writing reinforces my thinking that for writers — writing of any kind — is beneficial (though may be not email).  

Of course,  there is something special about the handwritten card or note and I look forward to receiving Christmas cards in the mail as much as I love sending mine.  For day-to-day “put your thoughts into the world” writing, blogging is productive and fun.  It might function for writers as a first draft.

For my birthday, my husband surprised me with tickets to an off-Broadway show, Buyer and Cellar.  The one man play (sold out most shows) is an expansion of Barbra Streisand’s basement mall.  In her book My Passion for Design, the singer/actress describes the “mall” she built in her basement and the playwright imagined what it would be like if someone were hired to work for it.  The play is hilarious and entertaining, but it made me think about the serendipity of the creative process.  Was the playwright, Jonathan Tolins,  hanging out in Barnes and Noble when he picked up Streisand’s book and his imagination went wild?  Where do ideas come from?   Can blogging help us form ideas?  

Invention or inventio, one of the five canons of rhetoric, is the one most fascinating to me because it is something from nothing.  It seems to me that to stay alive as a thinker and a writer we need to let our imaginations run a little wild.  Letter writing of old was an activity that calmed the mind enough, perhaps to stir the creative juices.  Can blogging be the new letter writing?  

Blogging gets things off my chest so I can put them out there and see what others think (or not, and that’s OK too).  It frees me to think of the next thing or go back and develop that blog into something grander.

Where have YOUR ideas come from?  What do you do to turn on your creativity?

 

Teaching Inspires

One of the most difficult aspects of being a writer is coming up with new ideas for projects.  I’m  fascinated about where writers find ideas.  I often reflect back with great enjoyment when I think about where I got some  ideas that turned into chapters, articles or books.  In today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, the author of Girl With The Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier, notes that when she saw the Vermeer painting in 1997 she just had to write about the girl peering out.   Truman Capote came up with his book In Cold Blood from reading about the killings in The New York Times.

When we actually try to come up with new ideas, often nothing happens.  That’s why I tell students:  read (reading a daily newspaper is required for the course), write, see, travel, do. In short:  experience as much as you can and be opportunistic about any good ideas that come to you.  

Today, while I was teaching students about the rhetorical situation, an idea about a new writing project popped into my mind.  I’ve taught now for more than twenty years and my students are now about the age of my son. 

It is almost impossible to look into my classroom filled with so much youthful promise and not get inspired. 

Nichola D. Gutgold is associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State Lehigh Valley and author of three books:  Paving the Way for Madam President (2006);  Seen and Heard:  The Women of Television News (2008) and Almost Madam President:  Why Hillary Clinton ‘won’ in 2008 (2009).