Mom in the Mirror

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?

Blogging for writers, writing for bloggers

I prepared this handout for a 2004 session I taught on blogging and writing.

What I've learned about writing since starting my weblog:

• It's fun to be your own editor.
• Write daily.
• Write quickly (15 minutes per day).
• It's easy to lower my standards.
• Short items force focus (so does writing headlines).
• Ask: What's a story? What part of my daily life might interest readers?
• Capture characters/scenes with details. Show, don't tell.
• Some blogs are like serial narratives or soap operas.
• Create distance and perspective by writing tomorrow's post today, then revising it later before publishing.
• Raise questions/solicit feedback.
• Pay attention to feedback (and review your stats) so that you can learn what interests readers.
• Intimacy and immediacy drive the medium.
• Discover your voice(s). My blog voice is casual and curious, not authoritative, different from my "news" writing voice or my "column" voice.
• Patterns will emerge. Over time, you build a body of work, detect themes, ways to categorize the material you're creating.
• Be the niche; blogs are close-ups.
• Find your audience (and let them find you). Talk to people who care.
• There is a tyranny of popularity. Try not to worry about who links to you, who comments, how many comments you get. Focus instead on the blog's purpose for you and whether you're accomplishing it.
• Discover other voices.
• Blogs democratize writing.

Some questions to consider:

• Is blogging writing?
• What can blogging teach us about writing?
• What makes someone a writer?