Stop this nonsense

Memo to the New York Times: so you love bloggers and want to write about them every single day. But honestly, it’s been annoying for months, and articles like this (“Look ma, bloggers with book deals!”) just make me want to crawl into a hole and hibernate until the whole fad goes quotes Elizabeth Spiers and Ana Marie Cox, among others:

Even bloggers who have sold books agree that there is one topic they would not focus on in the longer-form novel: blogging. "I don’t know how interesting a book just about the blogosphere would be," Ms. Cox said. "It’d just be people sitting in front of their computers."

Ms. Spiers summed up the general feeling: "There are no bloggers in my novel. None."

And thank god for that. The last thing anyone wants is to have the Metablogging Novel where people sit around in a bar and…I mean, come on. The reason blogging took off is that it allows a person’s individual, unedited voice to show through, something which, if they have the talent and stamina to do it, can be harnessed into a longer work. Even though I might not have heard of them until I started reading their blogs, I don’t want to read novels by Cox and Spiers because they are bloggers; I want to read them because I think they could potentially be good books with further potential to kickstart lengthy careers.

Eventually–I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened yet–blogging as fad will disappear, replaced as blogging as mainstream activity. In which case, the "hipness" quotient will similarly disappear. I guess I’m just mentally preparing myself for when these books come out (or earlier, for Belle de Jour and Jessica Cutler’s respective marketing plans implemented by their publishers) and question after question by interviewers all over the world will be about blogging, and not so much about the work in question.

Which means a whole lot more articles by said clueless yappy types at the New York Times…

Interestingly, Ron puts a different spin on it, wondering if the real point is that blogging allows female writers to carve out their own voices. There’s got to be something to it; I certainly don’t think it’s an accident that, for example, most litbloggers who have reviewed for major newspapers and magazines are women. But at the same time, even though I first knew many of them as bloggers, their work–be it fiction, poetry, essays, novels, reviews–marks them as writers, and good ones at that. Because people will stop talking about those hip blogs–but they might stand a chance of remembering the novels that got published as a result of people blogging.