Getting the blog read

I've begun to take one of the courses offered by MediaBistro--this one on how to get your blog read. Pretty cool, if I say so myself.

Apparently there is a technique to writing for the web and it appears to involve writing down. Down where? No place you can touch. (We're not into geology or altitude, here.) But we do operate within the framework of levels. In this case, it's levels of discourse and literacy.

If you've ever read the writings of our founding fathers, or more recently of George Eliot, you will see that daily commentary on the web is way different. Way.

Moreover, if you don't write into that difference, no one will be able to find your blog. I love the comment our teacher made: "Pure nirvana is when a writer can successfully combine creativity with web writing." Because that's the thing: we're not talking about beautiful or shapely sentences. We're talking about "search engine optimization." SEO. A three letter non-word.

We are, you see, wanderers on a new planet where writers no longer write for readers or editors. We now write for Google.

Not no one.

I'm thinking about something in a friend's email to me night before last. A while back I mentioned to him that I realized that, most likely, no one at all will read my novel. He responded as follows:

>which no one at all will read.
but now I know that that is okay.
that that is not important.
well. let me change that. as long as one person reads. and enjoys. then it's worth it.
one is enough.
that's my new rule.

That "one is enough" has been rolling around in my head ever since. I think it pretty well encapsulates the drive behind all efforts at putting words into public circulation. You're looking for the one person who will really *get* it. Contact. It's what we all need, especially bloggers, or we wouldn't be doing it, would we?

If I knew that there would be only one, though, would the impetus I feel to write longer fiction die out? Die is the right word, here, because the effort is against mortality. We write books, I think, to grab a little piece of immortality. Something of our selves will endure beyond us between the covers of a book, or a journal, or a packet of letters to a loved one (the epistolary form can be as little as ordinary letters between mother and son, sisters--the unique authorial voice as clear there as in the finest work of art).

Blogging is so different, though. It's all about connections right now. Twenty years from now is anyone you care about going to be able even to find all these digital words of ours? Aren't we spending time creating something even less enduring than our own fleshly selves?

Now back to that comment: *one is enough.*

Is it?