Tell Me Again, Why Am I Doing This?

Man alive.

Blogging must be an art similar to sculpting, portraiture, and playwriting because I stink at the first two, and I have no desire to pursue either.  I feel the same about blogging.  It does not come naturally; it proceeds in fits and starts, and I’m never sure what the point of it is.

Blogging is a slog.

Is blogging similar to keeping a diary or journaling? I never did either of those things, not on a regular basis; neither interested me. I did try a few diary entries when I was a pre-teen. That experiment lasted a few days. I tried keeping a journal once or twice, but making entries was something that just kept slipping my mind.

Why am I so resistant to the form – diary, journal, blog? A diary and a journal both seem to me private dialogues; ones you have only with yourself. You share what passes for your deepest thoughts and feelings and out of that comes purpose, resolution, or resolve. My first objection – the effort seems self-indulgent and solipsistic. My second objection - I can never decide whether I am writing for me, or for an audience, and, if I am writing for an audience, then it seems to me I’m not being authentic or true – I’m performing, putting on a show, trying to please someone else.

Blogging seems to call for introspection and self-analysis, but what I write seems self-absorbed rather than analytical, and it resembles introspection less than it does tedious naval-gazing.  And when I begin a blog post I know that I’ll be publishing my broodings online for the world to see. If I begin writing the blog post knowing that others will read and critique what I publish, am I performing? Am I editing my thoughts and myself to be more palatable, more pleasing, and more marketable?

I’ve concluded a few things:

1. When I blog, just as when I briefly tried journaling or keeping a diary, I am not particularly accurate or truthful;
2. I don’t like writing about myself as myself. I would much rather create characters and imbue them with some characteristic or quirk that is peculiar to me, add in traits and mannerisms I’ve observed in others, mix well, and watch the composite mutate and grow beyond my starting point. If I add in some ruthless editing along the way, I end up with writing that is more probing, interesting, and honest than I ever achieve in a blog post;
3. I almost never read blogs. If I don’t read blogs, how can I expect other people to read mine? And why am I trying to write one, anyway? I don’t read spy fiction or romance novels, and I’m not interested in trying to write in those genres, so why whip and lash myself to craft a blog when I don’t particularly like it and it doesn’t much engage me?

Having reached those three conclusions, does that mean I will never blog again? I don’t know. If nothing else, this bit of writing required mental effort and exercise. I’ve organized my thoughts, shaped them into a narrative, and pruned and edited along the way. I think that I’ve moved beyond my initial scattershot notion toward something more lucid and coherent.

The content may not be all that I could hope for, but the workout was beneficial.