Why do I not write as often as I would like? I see everyone else's blogs and get so inspired by them. And then have no clue what to put in my own. Partly because my life is so empty I really don't have anything great to write about, but also for other reasons...
Part of me feels shy about writing for an audience. And that part wrestles with the part of me who feels the best part of having a blog is the audience element. It really inspires me to write something, knowing it will be read, and it inspires me to write well. I've been reading over badly written posts of past and it's helped me work on where I think my writing is going wrong. I think I need to master the art of the vignette, I don't think I am particularly good at telling, in that I'm not amazingly clear.
So why do I feel shy? Because part of me feels really obnoxious writing about myself, especially when it's angsty rants about mainly men, or my failure to live life to the full, and there's so many people with genuine problems and stories out there. Part of me also feels like, "So why do I think I am so witty and well-informed that people want to read what I have to say?". There's so much fantastic stuff out there that I feel like a complete wannabe. I guess blogging is great in that it's ease and anonymity can remove these feelings about the authority of the narrative self. Blogging gives everyone a public voice I guess.
How to write is a big problem. There seems to be a great difference in writing for my blog and writing in my paper journal. My writing in my paper journal is more abstract, because as I am the only one I intend to let read my paper journal, there's no need to fill in on background. I can write a couple of random sentences and instantly be taken back to the whole story of why I felt that way. The benefit of the blog is that I am able to fully account for an event in my life. Another benefit is that my blog writing isn't perhaps as sporadic as the paper journal because of the audience issue.
Is a blog as secure as a paper journal in terms of it becoming an artifact of your life? Nothing beats the feeling of looking through all those paper journals from your past, stacked in a old shoe box, gathering dust on top of a wardrobe, the pages crispy with ink indentation. I worry about writing good stuff in my blog only for it to be lost in the years to come. There will be inevitable technological changes in the years to come, all those decades I hope to live through, it's not even as though one could back up a blog on disk, such is the frequency of technological advancements in data storage. The Internet will change and develop, will there be room for all this information, the blogs of millions of people? I know none of this is a problem with a paper journal. It's that lovely feeling of physicality, holding a journal in your hands, turning the pages, sitting down and writing, your handwriting. Not just codes, and the surrounding virtuality. I'm hoping to overcome the boundaries between the two forms by drafting blog pieces in my paper journal perhaps, so whatever happens I will have somethign to keep. I think documenting your life is so important. It keeps you sane, it always gives you an outlet.
Moreover, there is the severe problem of writer's block. I suffer from this terribly. My head swims with great ideas I cannot begin to articulate. Partly because I am shy and feel that when compared to the great work of my peers my work is rubbish, even though I don't have to show anyone my writings. I'm also extremely restless, I have a very short concentration span. All that TV, I guess, if the warnings of my Year Seven English teacher are anything to go by, I can sit through one hour's worth of dross in
Holby City, glued to the screen, no problem. Get me to do something meaningful and I'd rather pointlessly download music, or cruise MySpace, Livejournal, sex blogs. That might be the depression though, this restlessness, all this feeling and keen-ness swilling about inside you but never finding an outlet because you can't be arsed, you'd rather watch
Watchdog, shouting at the dodgy dealers confronted by the BBC, patron saint of disgruntled consumers. I envy my peers with their little worn notebooks full of poetry-don't even get me started on why I can't write poetry. I can't understand it, and I feel that writing it reqiures such a mastery of the English language because to me poetry is about turning a simple message into a riddle, wrapping it up cleverly with words-and their little film script ideas, and their hard-drives full of little stories. I used to have exercise books full of crap as a kid. Then I got a sense of my being in relation to the rest of the world and suddenly realised all I wrote was bound to be shit, and that really soured a perfectly innocent past-time.
Ah *big sigh*
As the very few of you who read this blog will probably have guessed, this site seems to have all but dried up. And just when you were all about to breathe a sigh of relief and have your faith in the blogging world restored, I come with news...