He was sitting there, some fella in a lab coat in that movie Contagion. The one where everyone’s scrubbing their skin raw because of some bad pork in Hong Kong. He looks at this internet bloke, the one with the dodgy tooth played by Jude Law, and he looks him dead in the eye and he says it.
—Blogging isn’t writing, he says. —It’s graffiti with punctuation.
He thought he was being clever, the scientist bloke. Thought he’d put him in his place.
But you sit there and you think about it. You think about it while you’re boiling in the kitchen. The missus is watching the telly in the front room. You watch the little cursor flashing on the screen. Like a heart monitor for a thought that hasn’t quite kicked in yet.
And you think: Too right it’s graffiti. And thank fuck for that.
Proper writing—the type that wins awards, with thick spines and gold lettering—takes too long. It’s like waiting for the council to approve a bypass. By the time it’s done, you’ve forgotten why you wanted to go there in the first place. You sit there, planning and worrying about your paragraph’s structure. You wonder if some guy in a broadsheet will say you’ve used the wrong metaphor. It’s exhausting. It’s like wearing a tight suit to the pub.
Graffiti, though. Graffiti is raw. It’s someone standing on a railway platform at three in the morning, shaking a spray can. The freezing drizzle falls around them. They feel something inside, ready to burst if it doesn’t hit the brickwork right away. It’s “I was here”. It’s “Look at this, look at what I’m seeing before the train comes and takes me away”.
Only, with a blog, you add the full stops.
You give it a bit of shape. You don’t spray the word across the bricks and leg it over the fence before the coppers show up. You take a breath. You put a comma in.
It’s the difference between shouting into the wind and leaning across the bar to tell someone a secret. The punctuation is you telling the reader where to take a breath so they don’t choke on the story.
At the bus stop, I spotted a bloke struggling with a meat paste sandwich. His dog tugged the lead, eager to go the other way. Meanwhile, the rain in the Midlands had that gloomy grey look, as if it wanted to blend in with the paving slabs. It’s small. It’s ordinary. A drab little bit of life.
If you put that in a book, the editor would say, Where’s the plot, Andy? Where’s the stakes?
But on the blog? It doesn’t need a plot. It needs to be true for the five minutes it takes to read it. You spray it up on the digital wall. You format it so it’s neat. You hit the button that says Publish, and it’s out there. A person in Birmingham, London, or even Tokyo clicks a link, reads about the dog and the meat paste, and thinks, Yeah. I know that feeling.
It is a genuine art form. Done with a keyboard instead of a black marker pen. It’s messy and quick. The council can’t bring a bucket of grey paint and a stiff brush to clean it off the wall the next morning. It stays there. A little mark that says you were alive on a Wednesday evening and you noticed something.
So let the scientists have their reports. Let the big writers have their hardbacks.
Give us the spray cans and the semi-colons. Every single time.