"Joel is from South Carolina, where his great-grandmother had an affair with George Gershwin. After fleeing the south as soon as he possibly could, he got a B.A. in linguistics from Harvard..."I could keep quoting Joel Derfner's madcap biography, but I won't. Suffice to say, the first time I met him, he was reading a story out loud in his underwear. He's a book writer and New York-based blogger with some smart things to teach you.
Welcome to the first installment of my interview with Joel Derfner, part of my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.
Jason Boog:
You've been building a webby community over at your blog for awhile now. How has your blog evolved? What are your favorite sites to visit? Do you have any advice for writers looking to create a web community?
Joel Derfner:
I've been keeping the blog for four and a half years, but for three and a half years it was anonymous. I was on Blogspot, and I posted as "Faustus, M.D.," a joke pseudonym based on the title character of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus...
When Gay Haiku was published, I moved the blog to joelderfner.com, but I kept on posting as Faustus, because he's very, very useful as a persona: he shares a lot of characteristics with me, but there are some important ways in which we're not the same. As Faustus I can say things that I would never be able to say as me.
My blog is called "The Search for Love in Manhattan." When I started writing it I was living on the Upper West Side by myself and desperately seeking a boyfriend, but now I'm living in Brooklyn (as of two months ago) with my partner of two and a half years. So in some ways the blog has outgrown itself--an issue I still struggle with and haven't figured out how to resolve.
My favorite blogs are Upside-down Hippopotamus and Walky Talky, I think because their authors are writing through personae as well. They make very careful decisions about what to include and what to leave out.
Which is what I'd say to anybody trying to create a web community: write carefully. A blog isn't your diary; it's writing for an audience, and the best way to hook an audience is to give them a character they like.
That character may be you--but you still have to make smart decisions about how you reveal different parts of the character. How does the character grow and change? What are the character's faults, and how aware is s/he of them?
Just because the narrator is based on a real person doesn't mean you should be any less careful about these decisions than somebody writing fiction. In fact you should be more careful.
And of course engage your readers. The laws of quantum physics dictate that what you write will be changed by the simple fact of its being observed. Turn that into a strength instead of a weakness.
Is your narrator insecure and needy? Let him worry about whether his readers will stop liking him. Is she mysterious? Let her tease her readers.
Want to know how to Derfner landed his first book deal? Tune in tomorrow for another exciting installment of Five Easy Questions...
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