On Blogging

It’s been 4 months now since I started this blog. And it’s been a different experience than I expected.

My mind set is constantly shifting as to how to approach it, what to write about, how personal, formal, trivial or spontaneous to be. I’ve been more personal and more formal than I anticipated, and less trivial and spontaneous. I’m not posting as often as I thought I would, but on the other hand, I feel content about the quality of the postings.

More than content, really. I have a sense of building something here, that every posting adds a piece to something with a mood, tone, energy and message, that reflects a substantial bit of me and my life experience and perspective. As I’ve been doing this, I’ve been journaling a bit less. And I’ve been getting to my fiction less.

My initial motivation was that this be a vehicle for me to put more of my writing where others can read and comment on in, and also to become more spontaneous and quicker about expressing myself. Through my writing life, my self-consciousness has been a barrier. I’ve tended to hold on to my reactions and judgements about things, wanting to be sure I was right, that I had something intelligent to say. In a sense, I was reluctant to dialog – to have a back-and-forth, give-and-take interaction with others or with the world at large. Anything I put forward, I wanted to be complete and finished...and unassailable. This blogging was to force me to take more risks, to be more open and in-the-moment. And I’ve succeeded in all that. I’ve definitely moved in that direction in these pages, though these continue to be the areas I need to make more progress.

The biggest surprise has been the difficulty writing about certain things, or sometimes, coming up with a notion, and angle, a subject to write about. I’ve been true to my requirement that I have a spark, a sense of motivation, an energy about anything I post here. And the sparks don’t always come as expected. There are a number of things, in the world, in my work, I thought I’d have written about by now. Some are just too big or complex for me to have come up with a blog-sized approach to them. Other things...well, they resonate in my life, they find their way into my journal, but I just haven’t had the spark to get to them here.

The other bit gets right back to the question of self-consciousness. What is it anyway, about broadcasting details of my personal life – and sometimes the lives of others? What’s that all about? Vanity? Personal Therapy? Some of that, I guess. I do ask myself, on some level, whether I think what I post here could be interesting to anyone else. And who is my audience, anyway? Friends, strangers, the General Public? I don’t feel I’ve figured all of this out. I don’t have answers. But I surmise and extrapolate from my own experience.

I like reading biographical and auto-biographical pieces. I like to explore how others have dealt with issues and challenges and desires and with other human beings. It informs be, challenges me, sometimes inspires me, to get another’s take on life. Is that what I’m hoping to do here? That’s at least part of it.

Bottom Line is, I want, I intend to be more of a writer. To be a more active writer. To be a writer more involved with addressing the project and the puzzles of living. I want to write pieces that somehow nourish. And I believe that I have experience and perspectives that can give a reading experience that I appreciate as a reader: the experience of being more open, more connected, maybe more alive.