One thing is for sure: Publishing sure has changed in 14 years. At one time publishing was all about printing. Today, while printing is still around, the emphasis is on computers.
And it's symptomatic of what's happening to the newspaper industry. There are still those people who read words as ink on newsprint, but their numbers are shrinking as more readers favor words as electronic bits and bytes on a computer screen.
I've watched the publishing of Boomerangst migrate from its weekly appearance on newsprint to include weekly distribution as en e-mail, then as an offering on a web site. Now it's time to "blog," which, for the uninitiated comes from "web log." Web log equals blog.
The significance of blogging as publishing is that it removes the barriers that have traditionally stood between a writer and his/her potential audience. To get published in a newspaper or magazine, for example, a writer needed the blessing of an editor. Even with some web sites, there is usually an editor or webmaster serving as gatekeeper with the responsibility of picking and choosing the content.
But anyone with electronic access can blog. If you want to rant or whine or opine in writing, you can rant or whine or opine as often as you want with no editor to refuse you. If people find you and read you, so much the better.
So I'll send my column each week to my editor who will prepare it for the newspaper and for the web. And I'll email it to the folks on my column address book. And now I'll blog it, because this old dog likes new tricks.
But one thing remains unchanged -- the effort of writing. There remains the process of getting the words out of your head onto a piece of paper or onto a computer screen. The challenge -- indeed the taunt -- of a blank piece of paper nestled against the typewriter platen or the impatient blink of a computer cursor remains.
Computers and electronic publishing don't make the creative process any easier, they don't ease the tension of having a deadline and having no thoughts about what to write.
My son David, a junior at Boston College, is taking a non-fiction writing course this semester, and while he has done a massive amount of writing as a history major he was faced with the tension of creative writing -- the taunt of the blank page.
More years ago than I like to admit I was a junior at the University of New Hampshire attempting to find my voice as a non-fiction writer. My Dad, a writer, wrote the following advice in January of 1973:
"The life of a writer is naturally tense, the man and his talent working against his own sense of inadequacy and the critics, after his long lonely vigil over the birth of his brainchild, waiting to pounce and make small of. The writer has to be an egotist, a believer in himself, because like all artists he must depend on himself, knowing there is no midwife; he must conceive, labor, and bring forth alone. It's the price of immortality, if the child does and can live. The price of mortality is doubt, anxiety, fear, even sometimes failure. But what the hell. It's worth the try. Life is for the living. Pick up the gauntlet, accept the challenge. Imagine how sweet the victory."
I passed the advice to David: words as true now in the age of electronic publishing as they were 35 years ago.
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