Saturday, October 31, 2009

Writing for Myself and other odd bits

http://writeanything.wordpress.com/fiction-friday/ is a fun site for seeing what people from many genre's can do given a single theme. The participants vary greatly any given week but most of the short tales are clever and well written and it's a good site to bookmark for your weekend reading and the site has other writings and activities of interest on other days of the week. See the Fiction Friday category for my most recent postings.


Writing for Myself

I’m not sure how it came up in my thoughts, I think just as a general brainstorm for non-fiction writing which I do a little. Yet there it was, the idea of writing for one’s self. For my two blogs, I don’t intend to write for myself, though sometimes it feels like I am. I feel like I’m inside the firewall instead of out, looking through the flames and seeing only an ambiguous darkness beyond, with no comments incoming, few followers, and no way to check who else might be checking in now and again.

Still, I’m always mindful that there are at least potential readers out there in the ether (I’ve heard ether used to describe the virtual world and wonder if anyone these days knows the word had an alternate meaning, as the substance that filled what is now considered a void between earth, and the moon and stars that circled it since the time of creation.) The nervous part of me is aware of identify theft and evil people who might conceivably use the information for traditional nefarious deeds, crimes of violence and passion, as well as the theoretically crimes between (is virtual stalking a real thing? Certainly we’ve seen in the press that harassment is real, though not necessarily a crime).

Still, despite the distant concerns, I learned long ago that some part of the self must be poured into the writing for it to attain life and substance and interest to others. The question is only what form that self should take, what can be revealed safely to the world, what part is necessary to the writing. So it is with all my writing, not just what I post online. Even when I write my journals, I am aware of a potential distant, future audience, and there, especially, I must put myself into my words if i’m to bother writing.

I put a lot of myself in journals, some would say. I go through a three-section or five-section notebook every year and a half or so these days, more than in the past both because the notebooks have fewer pages than they used to (the sections used to be fifty pages, not forty and less) and because the words of a professor of one of my graduate history courses persuaded me to do a little scrapbooking along the way. I add newspaper and magazine clippings, old membership cards, menus, ticked stubs, and comics, sometimes with commentary on what about them caught my attention, sometimes just to highlight the issues of the day, like schools closing for H1Ni (formeraly Swine flu). Those especially make me aware of that future audience, intended to be the historians of generations to come.

Long ago that wasn’t so, though I considered then that my heirs might find my journals , or in the fashion of the detective shows, some detective might browse them if my death was sudden and mysterious. The history, though, dominates my vision of the more likely reality, when digital files bit the dust in the absence of the old software and machines to read them. My reading and history courses and clubs have made me aware of the place the diaries of the dead have had in our history and literature, the unknown diarist as much as the famous.

Still, while I keep that potential audience in mind, I write for myself primarily for other reasons. For one, I like to write, plain and simple, whether I’m good at it or not hardly matters. Stil, we don’t just aritrarily like a thing or not, generally, and it comes with value, whether instinct or logic prods the liking. The sense and logic part came later, though, with writing courses that included a requirement for a daily journal, both to encourage the act of writing for the hesitant and as practice, for writing needs practice both to develop and maintain, and as a source of inspiration.

Journals are how we connect the world of our senses, our experience, our thoughts, to words and writing. To me it is a valuable first step for both nonfiction and fiction writing, even if my “journal” of the hour might be whatever scrap of paper I can get under my pen, to capture the essence of a place, an observation, reminders for a memory of events and sequences, or an idea for story scene or character pulled out of the blue.

For many, perhaps most, it is the only step. They don’t see themselves as writers, have no desire to be one, no matter how good at it they might be, but they journal for themselves, and the act of writing has value in itself, no matter the content or form. the journal has countless functions for mind and spirit, now and in the future, bringing focus, capturing essence, subconsciously prioritizing. For me, perhaps prioritizing most of all, or at least that is the one i am most academically aware of. Many diaries have but a few lines for each day and the limited spaces forces us to keep to what’s important if it isn’t merely what’s habit to record. Even with my unlimited length (I’d be thrilled to write regularly enough or completely enough to fill my big notebooks faster), my time and energy aren’t endless and i often write at the end of the day. So, I’m likely to capture at least those things whose brief importance has lingered to day’s end, sometimes week’s end or longer if my writing efforts have focused on fiction, meanwhile.

Like the boss’s feedback session. Even when I know the boss appreciates me, I might come away diappointed and frustrated by a choice of words an unexpected focus that seems to miss the point fo my contributions to the office. I might write about it that day or put it off, ot wanting to dwell on something I can do nothing about and that will only drive me to distraction if I try to analyze every word and phrase.

Days or weeks later it will surface again and get its day in my journal, when I had thought I’d left it behind; telling me that the hurt or some other aspect of it (rarely the praise which always seems to come more profusely from all but the ones who can effect my career). Sometimes some new insight, a comment by others undergoing much the same process, or some other unrelated experience will trigger the thought or new understanding as well as bringing it back to the surface of my attention amidst lesser matters, then i write about it. Perhaps it will finally settle into the hisotry of the past, or it might surface again in the absence of pressing concerns and I will dwell on it again until I can determine what to do with the memory and the associated thoughts, to set aside as past or offer some suggestion for the future and change.

Sometimes I hardly know why I write on the topics that I write. Other times I journal more consciously as well, such as for trip journals or for classes. (Such structured journaling can be helpful for more reluctant writers, such as bosses wanting a way to make sense of the chaos of their days, or wanna-be writers who don’t know where to start.) I’ve at times had several journals going at once, for myself, classes, and clubs.

One "journal" was for a poetry project, a tiny little notebook wherein we were to write a single sentence or phrase to capture the essence or the most important matter of the day. That was harder than it seemed, with full days of school, life, family, interpersonal relations and observations of the world, and sometimes I would cram several things in the sentence to avoid the choice. For work I have a limit of a small page per day, in a day-at-a-time calendar, to capture important tasks, record times and dates and brief content of meetings whose substance might be needed later, and to track progress on a dozen things at once. Though brief, or because its brief, it also helps me think through my tasks and make plans, and helps keep me from letting quick but unimportant tasks preventing progress on longer, larger projects that are ultimately more important.

The nature journal was more memorable than most, a fascinating challenge in the city, but doable with concentrated effort a few minutes a day. The effort was a great source of stress relief as well as a source for much inspiration. Weather was relatively easy and sometimes filled the absence of the rest. I went outside a few minutes every day regardless of the weather, though not always with paper in hand. I stood in rain, sunshine, snow, light and dark, to capture what I could of the air and sky. When I could, I walked a few blocks to capture more. I sought fountains and bubblers in the absence of streams, walked along grassy road divides in the absence of meadows or even much lawns, studied every tree for all that it could tell me of the place and the seasons, and watching for the city wildlife--birds and squirrels, at least. I found even the city’s limited nature to be sooting to eye and soul once i looked for it, but I would have found much less if not for the requirement of the daily journal, and would likely have noticed less if I hadn’t had to focus on sufficient detail to have concrete words to write.

Even much of my story writing is really for myself. I have hopes of publication (in the pst I would have said, of course, don’t we all, but have encountered many writers who aren’t interested in the sharing of their words at all, even if they want to learn to write better for themselves. Like leaders, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that those reluctant to the stage were the better to be found) but not for all that I write. I play with my characters in the worlds of other writers, or my own real world to see how they would act, react, whether they might have ideas that I could use for myself or just for fun. I put characters in unlikely places in other worlds of my own making, wondering what it can tell me of their characters or see if it could make the story more interesting for others. They give my daydreams substance they otherwise lack, and offer inspiration when I can’t find it in my own day-to-day life.

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