Thursday 19 April 2012

Blogging - the sense of an ending

Blogging – where is the end the middle and the beginning?   I’ve produced and edited websites for about 15 years and I’ve written articles but I‘m fairly new to blogging so I started in May 2011 with Silk weave. I soon found it quite exhilarating to be able to publish my own thoughts and ideas at the click of a mouse. 

My web content editing business at Silk Sense is where I work with other people’s writing and content that they or their firms have produced. But now I’m able to do my own personal publishing via blogs. My first effort was an article that I’d written for general publication ‘Chilli the hot and not so cool spice’. I decided to divide it into four chunks thinking that 1,200 words would be too much in one go on the web.
In May I posted the first part and when I put the second part live a day or two later I realised that what you - the reader - sees is the latest first -‘So how hot is hot?’ So I wrote my article on Joseph Pilates with less concern for a beginning middle and an end.
So how easy is it to tell a story or create any suspense this way? Do I start with the end and work backwards?  Perhaps make each piece stand on its own?  Can blogs tell a story or are they just one-off musings?

Could a novel be posted as a blog? How would Charles Dickens tackle this?

Charles Dickens’  ‘Oliver Twist’ was originally published chapter by chapter under Dickens’ pen name ‘Boz’ in monthly instalments in Bentleys Miscellany a popular magazine that Dickens edited. Dickens began publishing chapters of Oliver Twist in February 1837. Dickens was good at ‘cliff hangers’ ensuring that at the end of each chapter there was a ‘what will happen next’ moment.  In order to get the next plot twist readers would have to wait until the next edition and buy the magazine.

The final chapter was published more than two years later in April 1839. It was then that the fate of Oliver Twist and Fagin the leader of the pickpockets was revealed.
Dicken's moustache (part of plaque in Marylebone Road)

Well - I think I’ve answered my own question – if Oliver Twist was written chronologically chapter by chapter as a blog the reader would see the last chapter first and it would begin

Fagin from Oliver Twist

 ‘As Fagin sat in his cell waiting to be hanged.....’