Towse: views from the hill

Spinning is the blog of Susan Marie Rose Maciog Gibb.

Who?

Interesting look into the life of a reader, someone self-defined as “Learning life through Writing, Reading, Traditional Archery, Nature and Harvest, Computer Hardware, and watching people.”

The Web is a wonder these days, providing loads of opportunity to watch people act, roleplay (perhaps), wig out, gracefully sail through upsetting circumstances, overreact, underreact. …

Find someone on a newsgroup, in a blog, posting comments in reaction to an article. Imagine that person as a character in the story you’re writing. What you see on the Web gives you the barebones, the skeleton of the character. It’s up to you to flesh out the motivations, insecurities, craziness, saneness and make the character your own.

There’s been discussion here and elsewhere about whether (or not) dooce is a blog worth reading. I think so. Talk about finding someone who gives you loads of opportunity to peer into their lives!

“but she whines and whines and I’m tired of her whining about her boring life,” some say. Well. I’m tired of bombast and vicious rants, which is why I stopped reading certain blogs. I don’t read dooce daily. I do pop in every month or so to get a flavor of the personality. She would make such a good character in a story I haven’t quite cooked up yet.

What a brave new world this is, where no matter what sort of person we are or wish we were, we can read about others like or unlike us (and others can read our ramblings and dish with friends about how witless we can be and so on ad infinitum).