Writers for the big and small screen are increasingly writing for even smaller screens, despite the tiny audience, lack of remuneration, and their status as professional writers. But many express a strong urge to share their thoughts and wisdom (and rants) on the Internet, in a personal forum without the concerns of marketability, act breaks, or tone. Some writers desire to help other writers improve their skills or make it in the business; others need to procrastinate. Blogging lets them do all of those things at the same time.

Blogging is the activity of writing to a blog, or “weblog,” which is a like an electronic diary. It’s personal because it’s the blog author’s own experiences, feelings, or insight. It’s public because anyone with Internet access might stumble upon it. There are blogs on everything from cancer and cars to cats and chaos theory (really, it’s about children).

What makes a blog a blog is the comment section. With viewers who return to comment (and comment on the comments), a blog can become a virtual coffee klatch, albeit without the immediacy, the body language, or the caffeine. However, online arguments can get heated, and these “flame wars” are best quelled immediately, bloggers say.

It’s absurdly easy to start a blog. Blogging software ranges from dirt cheap to free, and even technophobes can, in a few minutes, send their thoughts about world events (or what they ate for breakfast) to a potential audience that circles the globe.

A wave of working television and film writers have started blogs, with more popping up regularly. Most are forums for discussing the art and business of writing. It might seem absurd for someone to write a treatment until 2 a.m. and then wake up early to write about writing that treatment, but they are. And they’re finding massive audiences.

Though it’s impossible to say exactly how many TV and screenwriters are blogging, most browsers agree that about two dozen well-read and well-regarded blogs have developed communities of ardent viewers and participants. Despite the rampant growth, it’s still an intimate community: blogs featured in this article link to other blogs, with authors each lavishing praise for the others.

And there is money to be made in blogging—some popular political, technology, and fanzine sites allowed bloggers to quit their day jobs. It takes a tremendous number of hits per day (the Internet equivalent of box office gross) to generate paying advertisers on a website. But no screenwriters admit to earning extra income from blogging. Even if they could rent out ad space, these bloggers say they wouldn’t do it. For them, blogging is its own reward.  

Boredom was Josh Friedman’s impetus for starting his blog, “I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing” (http://hucksblog.blogspot.com/ ). But he soon found blogging had a greater purpose than filling time. It became a way to develop a voice that he couldn’t express through screenwriting.

“I’m not out to help anybody,” Friedman says. “The blog is about me, and I don’t pretend to have answers about screenwriting. It is an outlet for my voice because in the projects I work on as a screenwriter I don’t get to be funny.”

Friedman’s posts tend to fall into the Hollywood-is-nuts category of anecdotes and rants. A February post excoriated both the entitlement of bad screenwriters, “whose only qualifications for being considered a screenwriter is the mastery of Final Draft and the ability to thread the brad through the hole without tearing the paper,” as well as the system that he said treats all screenwriters as disposable. However, Friedman admits that he more often pokes fun at himself. The posts turned serious in January as Friedman recounted his battle with a personal health issue.

Because he’s a comedy writer, Ken Levine naturally distills career anecdotes, reviews, and opinions with a generous dose of humor on his, www.kenlevine.blogspot.com. Recently, he surmised what he would do if he were on Survivor: “First, I’d have to give up religion. Jews don’t camp.” Two popular posts were a description of his evening at “porn star karaoke” and the complete, “lost” script from a Super Bowl promotion for Cheers, a show Levine wrote.

For Levine, the blog is like having a daily column and has taken on a life of its own with readers from around the world. “I’m big in Croatia,” he says. Humor and anecdotes aside, Levine said he most enjoys the chance to give advice to aspiring writers.

“I wish there were blogs when I was starting out, because I was looking for a way to check out what established writers were doing and contact them. Studios were castles with moats back then.”

Craig Mazin and Ted Elliott also wanted to help writers, so they launched ArtfulWriter.com. According to Mazin, the Artful Writer is “the Wall Street Journal of screenwriting blogs. We want to influence a new generation of industry-savvy, production-savvy writers.”

Rather than provide a personal forum like many bloggers, Mazin and Elliott keep the Artful Writer focused on the craft and business of writing, including stand-alone essays on working methods, craft insights, approaches to development, and production-oriented strategies. The blog even features wonkier articles on credits policy, labor law, and the collective bargaining agreement.

In one recent post, Mazin explained how every film production has a “stand-by painter” but few have “stand-by writers.”

“Part of that post explained why I thought this problem had arisen from decisions that were probably quite reasonable, and the rest of the post outlined a real-world prescription for solving the problem,” Mazin says. “We’re very whine-averse. Our focus is almost entirely on arguments we think studios, producers, and directors would find persuasive and mutually beneficial.”

With a nearly three-year-old blog, John August is now regarded as the granddaddy of screenwriter-bloggers. His eponymous blog is an extension of a question-and-answer column he wrote for IMDb. “I had gotten frustrated that a lot of the same questions were being repeated over and over,” he says. “The IMDb column had and still has a frustratingly poor archive system that makes it hard for people to look for old answers. My site is a way of getting all that information out there in a more easily searchable way.”

Filled with writing and industry information for writers at every stage of their career, August’s blog archives posts by topic: news, first person, ‘geek’ things, and his projects. Possibly the largest part of the archives is Q&A about the craft and business of screenwriting, including everything from formatting and pitching to rights and copyrights.

“Many of my readers are just curious about what it’s like to be a professional screenwriter, so I try to interject a sense of how I go about my job, if not necessarily all the details of each particular project,” August says. “But the site isn’t a community in the way a message board is. It’s very top-down, John-driven. I don’t want to play policeman.”

August admits that he used to have a “strict church-state separation” between John August the screenwriter and John August the person, but now he allows himself the occasional rant or tangent. “But I don’t talk about the gross things I found in the fridge or stuff like that.”

TV writer and author Lee Goldberg started his blog, www.leegoldberg.com, two years ago as a tool to promote his books. Since then, it has become another creative outlet.

“My blog is now a warm-up tool and a procrastination tool,” Goldberg says. “I start it in the morning and go back to it if I get blocked with my projects.”

Goldberg tries to post once a day no matter what he happens to be writing for money. He even posted regularly, using dictation software, when he had two broken arms. Though he offers advice on the craft of writing and insight on navigating the industry, many of his posts are about “funny and stupid things” that happen in the business. A recent example is a recounting of a meeting with a TV executive to find out what the network was looking for:

“We’re wide open,” she said. “The only things we don’t want to hear are cop shows, science fiction shows, anything set in the past, military shows, buddy detectives, or stuff with monsters.”

I could think of only one genre she left out. “What about a medical show?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “We don’t want those either.”

Blogs can help people in more subtle ways, according to Patricia Wallace, the director of information technology at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Psychology of the Internet. Wallace observed that blogs and such other Internet forums as bulletin boards draw many who feel isolated or need to vent frustrations with like-minded people. Given that, one might say blogs were made for screenwriters.

“Blogs tend to form virtual communities of people who express similar concerns, whether it’s the arts or politics or knee surgery,” Wallace says. “Some claim the bond is even stronger than face to face group interactions because people relate feelings to their virtual colleagues more easily.”

But Wallace warns that the strange mix of anonymity and intimacy can cause bloggers and posters to write things they’ll later regret. Unfortunately, on the Internet, there’s no taking it back. “Once a comment is on the web, it’s out there for good and can be dredged up years later. But people too often treat the medium like it’s ephemeral and will post a comment in haste only to be burned years later.”

To be circumspect, Goldberg sanitizes his “horrible but true” anecdotes. “My golden rule is never trash people I work with,” he says. “In fact, I don’t put down anything that I wouldn’t want to see in the Calendar section of the L.A. Times, because I’ve ended up there when journalists quoted my blog.”

Wallace also warns bloggers to watch how much time they spend in their virtual communities: “For many people, the Internet can be a big-time drain, especially for people who tend to procrastinate.”

Writers, again, take note. 

In addition to the potential time drain, blogging can be mentally and emotionally draining as well. Although most bloggers start out with low expectations and few readers, at a certain point a pressure to perform can kick in and make the author feel guilty for spending too much time on other things—like writing a TV pilot.

TV writer Paul Guyot had amassed a small but devoted audience of screenwriters and mystery writers to his blog, www.paulguyot.net. “I wanted to show new writers outside of L.A. and New York how the business really works,” he says. “Unfortunately, there are some screenwriting blogs out there that are throwing out bogus information.”

Guyot spent nine months dispensing his views on what it takes to be a working writer, and in a series of posts he walked readers through the pilot development process with brutal honesty. But in January he decided he was spending too much time thinking up posts and way too much time viewing other blogs (this tends to go hand in hand with blogging). So he went cold turkey on both.

“When I was posting to my blog, I was reading 30 other blogs a day” Guyot says. “It was more energy-consuming than time-consuming, and sometimes it was tough deciding what to talk about. Finally, I realized I’m not on staff so I should have a lot of free time. If I could put that amount of time into my writing instead of blogging, I could be a lot more successful.”

Levine is also realistic about the blog versus career tug of war. “Blogging is fun right now, but if it ever starts to feel like work, I’ll stop doing it.”