Julie Powell on writing and blogging

The interview below originally appeared in Borders' "Original Voices" publication for October-November 2005. It struck me as a very interesting commentary on how blogs are changing writing and publishing. See what you think.

When Julie Powell turned 30, she was a secretarial temp living in Queens with her husband and cats, and her biological clock was ticking. From a search for purpose, the Julie/Julia project was born: She'd cook all 524 recipes in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in one year, tracking her progress in a Web diary. Her blog entries formed the ingredients for Julie & Julia.

Borders: If you had merely kept a private diary of your experiment, instead of publishing a blog, how would that have affected your project?

Julie Powell: If I'd merely been keeping a diary, I'd have quit the second I hit a rough patch. I'm really not one for challenging myself. The blog gave me a built-in audience. It's like getting on stage: You can't really see what's beyond, but you know there's someone to perform for. Even if there's only one person, you're there for someone.

Also, since readers were following what I was doing, communicating with me, the writing took on a different form than it might have in a diary. Writing a blog is unlike writing a book, because you're doing it among people, whose feedback you get nearly instantly.

Borders: Are blogs shaping what gets read and what gets published?

Julie Powell: If I'd written a book proposal saying how I wanted to cook through a Julia Child book in a year, it'd have been a miracle if it hadn't been thrown into the paper shredder. Instad, I went online, and people found me. Perhaps no publisher could have guessed that there's a built-in audience for a 30-year-old secretary with a Julia Child fetish, but I got hits on my blog. It's a way for readers to express what they want to read instead of waiting passively for the right book to come along. At the same time, I hope I wrote a book that was more than the sum of my blog entries. Any blogger content to rest on her daily bread of one-liners will not be able to write a book that will, or should, find readers.

Your turn: If you kept a private diary instead of publishing a blog, how would that affect your writing? Are blogs shaping what gets read and what gets published?

Comments

[Robin P]

You have to remember that I began writing for DotMoms before I had a blog of my own. I liked being able to write what was on my mind and having that immediate feedback was a happy surprise. People liked what I wrote. I was shocked.

That inspired me to start my own blog which I love. I find that I think about what I am writing when it is something very important to me since I know I have an audience (even though it's a small one.)If it was just a diary entry,I wouldn't think about it at all. I'd just write. Having an audience changes what I say.

[Lucinda]

After receiving too many rejection letters, I started my blog to find out whether there would be -any- positive response out there to my writing. And I was totally surprised to learn that there was.
My blog has helped me to find my voice as a writer and my "blog friends" have given me priceless encouragement.

And I fully believe that blogs are determining what's being read and will eventually play more of a role in what's being published. It only takes a few key bloggers to latch onto something and suddenly, it's all the buzz in the blog world. Once that happens, it's generally not long before the media catch on.

[Julie]

The audience is a big factor for me too. Even when I had NO audience, I wrote to entertain myself (and hopefully others), rather than in a confessional style as I might if I were writing in a journal. I also enjoy writing about current events now and then (as apolitically as possible), citing online references. I wouldn't do that in a journal, and having an audience helps keep me honest.

[Katrina]

I'd say that my blog writing is definitely different from anything I'd do in a personal journal because of the invisible audience. Of course, it probably doesn't help that I told my friends and family about my blog, thereby eliminating 90 percent of my best material in the interest of keeping said friends and family...