Some of my favorite things to read are blogs. Sometimes well-established ones, sometimes very small-project, obscure, personal ones. There’s something about the style and format—its earnest, unselfconscious, casual window into a hobby or way of life—that I find captivating.

A lot of blog posts go something like this. Say it’s a piece about canning tomatoes. “I’ve been learning more about canning lately, and I’m starting to feel like I can actually do something with this glut of tomatoes I somehow managed to grow. And with the last tomatoes of the season weighing down the vines, and the first suggestion of winter in the air, it’s time to start.”

I can almost feel like I’m in the garden, or out hunting the deer, or knowledgeable about plumbing or tilework; whatever the subject happens to be, it’s made relatable. Some little piece of the thing is transmitted. Good blogging almost feels like fiction, in the sense that it paints a picture, tells a story. It isn’t the bare writing of journalism, and it often lacks the formula and narrative of opinion writing.

This stream-of-consciousness, casual, conversation-style writing that’s also quite refined—it really constitutes its own style. It can be done poorly or expertly, of course, but when done expertly, it shines. It’s as much a skill and art as longform journalism.

If you follow these little publications for long enough, or go far enough back in the blogroll, you’ll often find that it all coheres into a body of work that fits well together. If one entry notes a successful tomato canning day, an entry from last year’s tomato season might recount a failed attempt.

Sometimes you can sense the blogger’s attempt to come up with a piece of content, those moments when the blogger serves the blog and not the other way around. It’s a window, however, into the humanity of the writer, and the fact they’re often not a professional. The subject of the blog is the hobby or the work, not the blog itself.

I want to quote at length from a recipe page at The Woks of Life, probably the best cooking/recipe blog I’ve found. We even bought (actually pre-ordered, early last year) their book for Christmas. So many of these blogs walk up to the line of being paragraph after paragraph of vapid filler prose and Amazon links. It resembles advertising or lifestyle branding—“content,” not someone’s life—and some of it basically is.

Not this one. The Woks of Life pages contain relatively minimal but sufficient background. But sometimes something deeper: stories about coming to America or growing up Chinese-American or advice on serving a Chinese meal versus a Western one or recreating a nostalgic but unknown recipe from China. Over the years, you can see the family’s two daughters growing up, the parents aging, life getting busy or calming down. The humanity enhances the information. This excerpt is from one of the family’s daughters, for a recipe involving preserved “century eggs”:

We moved to a different town just before I entered the eight grade—a town where the teachers kept calling me Jennifer or Evaline (the only two other Asian 13-year-old girls within a twenty mile radius), and where, the first time I had dinner at a new friend’s house, I had a slice of cheese pizza, milk, and a Centrum vitamin for dinner.

I’m not sure if it was the Centrum that did it, or maybe that tall glass of whole milk, but I was suddenly torn between loving all the home-cooked dishes my parents prepared (they were certainly better than a side dish of chalky vitamins), and a My-Big-Fat-Greek-Wedding sort of anxiety about them.

(Not to mention anxiety over the time my grandpa went to the local sit-down pizza place with us, grabbed a butter knife and a slice of white broccoli, and started shoveling cheese into his mouth with the butter knife like it was a pair of chopsticks and he was eating a bowl of rice. People stared. I died).

In that first year, when I was in I’m-the-new-kid-please-like-me mode, I was insecure—dare I say, embarrassed?—about the food that was being prepared daily for dinner at our house….

And then in college, I had a Korean roommate, and she’d bring Korean blood sausage, kimchi, and pig’s feet from home. This pretty much kicked the insecurity for good.

I started making this dish a lot in my dorm room, because it doesn’t require any cooking. I’d just take the necessary ingredients out of the mini fridge, steal some scallions and garlic from the dining center, and keep tofu in the fridge.

My roommate and I would steam some rice and eat this while watching Disney movies on VHS. And it wasn’t weird at all.

This is such perfect and honest stuff, but there’s no real outlet for it outside of the blog, as a format. If it were an essay, it would have to be written differently. If it were an article, the pathos would be stripped out. A good blog is basically very good conversation.

And the comments. The best part of an old-fashioned blog is its freewheeling comments section, where genuine discussions often played out, of a sort that seem almost impossible in the age of social media.

I write this all, as you might suppose, because I try to do this with my own writing. I’m only a writer because I write a lot. And I realize that some of the best examples are not from columnists or journalists or authors but just other people out there who picked a topic they loved and learned by doing until their little public/personal diaries attracted a real audience. Not always big; but real.

I’ve written about blogging before, as well as the sort of video version of it: YouTube channels focused on a hobby or interest, where the channel owner is also a character in his own right. I find these projects inspiring too.

Check out those two pieces, and the people who I link to:

The Bones of the Blogosphere

“Experiment YouTube” and the Democratization of Knowledge

And let you me know what you like to read or follow, whether or not you’re also a writer!

Related Reading:

Forgotten But Not Gone

Am I a Content Creator?

Sanctuary

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