Like every other blogger in America, I read the article in the New York Times this morning about the mishaps of confessional blogging. That isn’t a weakness of mine, mostly because I have forbidden it to myself. But it caused me to realize that I have forbidden myself so many vices, that blogging seems an awfully constrained genre.
Most of my self-imposed taboos stem from the fact that I’m not being paid to write this blog. Without pay, it seems imprudent to devote time and energy to research, and without research, one does not dare to make too many statements of fact. Occasionally a genuine piece of news does fall into one’s lap, without effort, but if one is a professional writer, one must then try one’s best to take it to market. (And here perhaps is the greatest peril of blogging for a professional writer, that you don’t always know which interest is going to bloom into a full-fledged article or worm its way into your next book, and so an item may seem safely ephemeral and amateur, and yet later you might regret having committed yourself to an assertion about it.)
Thus one is left with opinions, preferably about things outside one’s area of expertise. But if one isn’t being paid, it seems prodigal to make enemies unnecessarily. And so one is confined to positive opinions of contemporaries, and free opinions of the dead. Before I had tried it, I wouldn’t have imagined that the lack of an editor would be so limiting.