
Dr. Tanya usually appears in this time slot with her weekly Blogging Insights prompt. However she let us know today in this post that she won’t be doing a Blogging Insights post today. But don’t worry, Dr. Tanya says she hopes to be back again next week.
So, in her absence, thought I’d take it upon myself to fill-in for Dr. Tanya, who provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote. I didn’t ask for her permission, so I sure hope Tanya is okay with this.
The quote I chose is from author Gustave Flaubert, a French novelist who was a leading proponent of literary realism.
“You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.”
My blogging buddy, Jim Adams, says that he writes for himself and doesn’t care all that much about what others think of his posts. That may be true for him, but I believe that most of us who blog do so because we love writing and do it because we are driven by our love of words. At the same time, we keep our prospective readers in mind. Our blog posts provide a platform for us to create something at least compelling, if not beautiful, and to share what we write with our blogging community.
Flaubert, who died in 1880, didn’t write in the age of the internet, where writers get instant feedback on their writing via views, likes, and comments. But as bloggers, we do get information from our stats, almost in real time, and those stats help us gauge whether what we write engages our readers.
So from my perspective, I do write for myself, but I also keep my readers at the forefront of my mind, and I hope they find my writing somewhere between passable and beautiful.