Writing about Writing

This blog was born to give myself a quasi-creative outlet minus the serious analysis and editing required of most things I write. A second, more minor reason for this blog was to allow myself to somehow feel connected, to let other people into the normally intensely private world in which I live and let them see a side of myself unguarded. This has been impossible to maintain.

I said once that blogging requires the presence of three factors: a passion/annoyance/sense-of-the-interesting for a particular subject matter; a desire to express one's thoughts on said subject; and, lastly, a desire to share those thoughts with others. Lately, I've been prone only to the first two out of three, and this does not a blogger make. My need for privacy, while held for a moment at bay (though not really; most of my posts skirted, whether cleverly or clumsily, around the heart of my reality), has returned full-force and I no longer have any desire to extract the senseless and superficial and coat them in some sort of attractive gloss. Why I couldn't make a career out of writing about plaid pants and bus stops, I will never know.

Until I realized this about myself, I was struggling with what I thought was a form of writer's block, and, my God - that is now officially on my list of top five most unpleasant sensations ever encountered in this lifetime. This means that lately I've been thinking about writing more than actually writing, the realization of which gave me an attainable and happy purpose for this blog: an exploration into the whys and hows of the writing process. How did we become writers? How does writing shape the way we process and remember events? What's up with that dreadful writer's block, anyway? With respect to blogging, what is it like to have your social status in flux with every post, and to have complete strangers segue into conversation with a casual, "Heeey... I've been reading your blog."?

So: writing about writing. In my next post, I'll tell you about my first thrill with writing, and the horror I felt when I rediscovered that little piece - resplendent with bad grammar and spelling errors - a year or two later. Stories like these give insight to the buddings and struggles of writerhood that aren't directly evident from the-thing-that-is-written. I hope, if you identify as a writer, that you'll feel free to share stories of your own.

Lastly, I'm still very much an ego-centric human being: I retain full rights to pop in and recount various goings-on in my life, particularly if I'm passionate/annoyed/find-it-ridiculously-interesting. And, of course, if I want to share all that with you.