"A 55,000-Word Blog Post"

Thankfully, I no longer produce much in the way of non-fiction, blog-based or otherwise. Andrew Sullivan reminds me why:

It's not the amount of time that's taken in writing a book that matters, it seems to me. Some masterpieces have been written very quickly. It's the motivation. If your primary motivation is to hit the hot button, to rush a book to market around a newsy meme, then you are unlikely to produce anything that lasts. I miss the days when books were written because an author simply had something to say and took her time to say it well.

My newsy output always rubbed my caveat bone the wrong way.¹ It's easy enough to oversimplify complex issues in a way that will attract a large audience that agrees with you, but I was always revisiting posts after I'd thought of some crushing oversight in my reasoning, and I was never willing to make the rhetorical sacrifices required for continued audience growth. I was, in short, far too neurotic for that sort of thing. My readership peaked a few months after U.S. soldiers hauled Saddam out of his spider hole, and there was a noticeable uptick in my mental quality of life when I finally quit writing about Things That Matter.

Sullivan is responding to Damon Linker's comments about a "new partnership between The Daily Beast and the Perseus Books Group that will publish books on a highly accelerated schedule."

What Beast Books is proposing, and what Klein is promoting, is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing. The typing might be clever, and witty, and informed, and politically useful. But in most cases, it will also be hurried and harried, merely echoing or negating the conventional wisdom of the moment, not placing it in a wider context or viewing it from a broader perspective. And that will be a incalculable loss to our culture.

To bring that sentiment over into my world: an onslaught of sparkling vampire- and young wizard-style books² would be, I think, the fiction equivalent of fast-tracking a newsy meme.

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¹Holy crap that's awful. It's so awful I'm leaving it right where it is. Behold!
²"-style" indicates literary Dairy Drink.