My Blog-a-versary! A Decade of Blogging.
My Blog-a-versary! A Decade of Blogging.
October 9, 2018, 8:18 pm
Filed under: writing | Tags: anniversary, blogging, decade, niche, Paul Jarvis, stats, ten, theatre, tin
Ten years ago, I reluctantly came back to NYC from London and in the first few weeks of that return, I started the blog. I think the seeds of the blog had been planted months before but it took the displacement of the move to really begin growing.
In retrospect — there were two, maybe three, inciting experiences, that led to this blog that I definitely never imagined I’d still be doing ten years later.
One of those was a lunch I had with a friend from high school with whom I’d done some community theatre. She had pursued a high-powered business career but had always wondered about her theatre path not taken. I pursued theatre without question, though with a great deal of angst and hearing about the realities of my life choice seemed to make her feel better about hers. At some point in the conversation, she suggested making a magazine for struggling artists. She seemed really interested in the ins and outs of the lives of those of us who made this other choice. I took her suggestion seriously. I’m not sure I’d be blogging today had I not had that conversation.
Another factor for the blog’s beginnings was my attempt to reconcile my compulsory return to the US. I’d been greatly inspired by theatre in the UK and I was devastated to have to return. I felt I wanted to try and bridge the gap — to try and bring a little of what I learned in London back home. Some of my earliest posts were part of a series called What I Wish American Theatre Would Learn from the Brits. At least one of them actually happened. (Nothing to do with me, I’m sure. And if I could have only chosen one to come pass, it would not have been that one.)
Another factor in the blog’s creation was my interest in returning to music — it’s why the blog was called Songs for the Struggling Artist. I linked the posts to tunes in my Reverb Nation account that no one had ever heard. This was a practice I quickly abandoned. But it is funny that in the podcast version of the blog begun a few years ago, I returned to the songs. Sometimes the future of a thing is buried in its beginnings.
A few things I’ve learned in a decade of blogging. One — the market for work about struggling artists is really small, like so small, you can’t even believe how small. So, ultimately, that magazine my business friend suggested would have been a flop.
If my stats are any indication, people care about sexual harassment and maybe feminism a little bit — but the people who care about issues effecting struggling artists are few. My perspective on this was completely skewed because it felt to me that EVERYONE was a struggling artist but that’s because almost all my friends are struggling artists. To me, the world is full of ’em. But there aren’t nearly as many of us as I thought. And certainly a magazine for us would never have flown because struggling artists almost certainly couldn’t afford to buy such a thing.
And struggling artists weren’t the only niche market, I discovered. Because I’m a theatre maker, I wrote about theatre fairly often — but theatre, too, is very niche, I realized. I discovered this when I began to explore the idea of writing a feminist theatre column somewhere. In my years in the theatre, I’d thought feminism was the niche market — because within theatre, it is. (The feminist revolution has been VERY SLOW to ARRIVE in theatre.) But when I began to investigate how to pitch this column to publications, I realized I’d have to reverse my thinking entirely. Whereas I’d initially thought I’d have to make a case for feminism, it was really theatre that I’d have to make a case for. I thought about writing for Bust or Bitch — both of which have feminist culture critique. But theatre is not TV or Film or Music. Theatre was just too niche. I’ve had this sense of this confirmed by a friend who edits a theatre publication. Theatre is niche. Theatre education is even nichier. Struggling Artists are niche.
But to my small community, occasionally, I get the privilege of expressing something unexpressed. I get to illuminate some thing that had once been in niche-y darkness. I may not really speak to the mainstream but really, that’s what a blog is for.
Blogger Paul Jarvis summed this up in his most recent post this way:
Content on the internet currently is designed for scale, for sharing, for the masses. This runs counter to blogging, which is for a specific niche, a specific group, a specific interest a few people might have.
By chasing the current state of content we can lose what made the internet awesome in the first place: unique voices, sharing specific ideas, for a tiny subset of folks interested in them, clicks and viral-ness be damned. Writing for everyone really means writing for no one. It means using shock and outrage, changing every few minutes, to create share-worthy rage but nothing else. It means clicking through 19 slides to realize the information presented was designed more to get you to see an advertisement than to share something useful with you.
And as niche-y as this blog may be, it is the most popular thing that I do. By a long shot. I’m very grateful to it for giving me a space to share my thoughts and to make a difference. It has become a support for me via Patreon. It has become the vehicle for my intro to podcasting and led to the creation of two podcasts — the Songs for the Struggling Artist blogcast and Reading the Library Book. It has led to the creation of five albums worth of music and thereby brought me back to something I loved and abandoned. And I’m especially grateful to the people who have read the blog, heard it, heard me, helped me have confidence in my own words, my anger, my ideas, my voice.
Thank you for the last decade. Let’s see what develops in the next one.
This blog is also a podcast. You can find it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you’d like to listen to me read the previous one on Anchor, click here.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are now an album of Resistance Songs, an album of Love Songs, an album of Gen X Songs and More. You can find them on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Writing on the internet is a little bit like busking on the street. This is the part where I pass the hat. If you liked the blog (but aren’t into the commitment of Patreon) and would like to give a dollar (or more!) put it in the PayPal digital hat. https://www.paypal.me/strugglingartist
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Originally published at artiststruggle.wordpress.com on October 10, 2018.
