"Sometimes in my room I imagined myself fighting other kids, and felt I had something powerful to unleash that would surprise them, given my size. This did not turn out to be the case, and when Tyra socked me in the stomach, I fell into a bush. I did everything I could to laugh and show her it didn't hurt. I pretended I could still breathe, even tried to stand up straight."
That's a moment of sublime teenaged slapstick from Susan Henderson's Pushcart-nominated story, "Motorhead." Henderson runs the bustling writing website, LitPark, and this week she will teach us the fine art of web writing.
Welcome to the first installment of my interview with Susan Henderson; 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:
The art of writing is evolving as print publications struggle and blogs multiply like rabbits. Your career has crossed both these worlds in interesting ways. In your experience, what makes your web writing different from your paper writing? Any advice for new writers looking to write a blog or website? Continue reading...
Susan Henderson:
The difference is spontaneity.
If you read any of my more traditional work, you can see how I labor over every sentence and I try to layer the meaning, all of those things. Most of my web writing is creative non-fiction told in my regular speaking voice--how I'd tell a story at a barbecue or something.
My sense of humor shows a lot better in my more relaxed writing. At first, it felt really vulnerable to make the transition because I'm a perfectionist by nature and it was like showing someone the real me behind all the schooling and big books. Now, I might even prefer the casual writing to the formal writing.
Advice for creating a new blog? The world does not need another blog, so the very first thing to answer is, Why? Why do you want people to stop whatever they're doing to read your blog?
Then ask yourself, Why you would want to stop whatever you're doing to write a blog? If you decide to forge ahead, two things matter: an original voice and a focus.
Some of my favorite blogs that have voice and focus are Heather B. Armstrong's Dooce, Brad Listi's Attention. Deficit. Disorder., Robin Slick's In Her Own Write, and Patry Francis' Simply Wait.
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