The Blog vs. The Book

It's amazing how easily writing a blog comes to me. I'll sit down and stare at the computer screen for a couple of minutes, sometimes surfing around the same 5 sites I always look at, and then the ideas come to me. The words flow, the paragraphs could be endless. I have to restrict the size of the bites I throw out there for people to digest.

Trying to write a book, on the other hand, goes nowhere. The initial plan was to begin pounding it out as soon as my trip was over. If I put together three sentences on a single topic, my brain hurts. After a half an hour I have 6 or 7 such blobs of incompatible nonsense. My sentences are run-ons, my analogies forced. It's some of the worst writing I've ever done.

There could be several reasons for this. One is probably audience. I like to have immediate response to my ideas. If there's no one giving me the thumbs-up, I have no motivation to continue. Another is breadth. When I write a blog, I usually have just one topic to cover in three or four paragraphs. It's easy to build a small case and close it, without worrying about anything else I will have to write in the future. Starting a book, on the other hand, is an overwhelming task. How do I even begin to write about my first day? I can't leave anything out! What will the themes be by the time I'm done?

For now, at least for the moment, I'll stick to blogging. It gives me that artistic outlet and keeps the creative juices flowing. See, in good books, they don't use cliches like "creative juices". Oh, the struggles...