Last night I was thinking about getting back into blogging, and maybe even blogging about writing, in order to get myself to write more, even if it's just writing about writing. So I go to my long-neglected blog, and what do I find? I had exactly the same idea almost exactly a year ago, and I never followed up on it. At all. Also, I'm cringing reading those words, wondering how this stranger from the past ever could have thought what he was doing was witty, or original. Maybe that's too harsh, but that's how I felt skimming those words, unable to read more than a few at a time. Maybe it's the hopefulness of it all that bothers me the most, knowing how little has been accomplished since then, like that statue of Ozymandias lying in ruins amid the endless desert.
It's not exactly like I've been idle since then, though. I've moved to Brooklyn, run another marathon, changed jobs, GOTTEN MARRIED... All those things too a lot of time and attention, and it's shown in how little I've watched TV or played video games over the past years. It still doesn't feel like things have entirely settled down (there's another marathon coming up in November, after all), but I don't think I have quite so many major milestones ahead of me at the moment.
So should I try this crazy experiment again? Will it end up the same way? Yes, and god I hope not. Why have I started to feel hopeful again? Well, a lot of it has to do with the fact that a friend of mine introduced me to a site called 750 Words a few months ago, and it's given me an excuse to start writing again in a non-NaNo capacity. I was given extra incentive by a writing course I took back in the spring that introduced me to the concept of "morning pages", where you write at three pages worth of whatever comes into your head first every day, just to keep yourself writing. So far I've written over 40,000 words on it during about 50 not-all-consecutive days, although I can't say I'll be sharing those words with the world at large anytime soon. I've been writing words more to get them out of my system than to speak to any particular audience, so I've spent many of them going on and on about topics too quotidian or inane to be worth anybody else's time, and in some cases I've written out thoughts too personal and/or specific for me to feel like letting loose on the world at large (where they'll immediately be swallowed up by the din of another million voices aching to be heard, but still...).
The only problem is, if I'm going to start writing for an audience again, it's going to slow my writing down, making these entries take longer to write and lowering the chances that I'll actually follow through with them. I'm not going to force myself to vomit every single entry onto my blog, but there are a number of topics that have been swirling around my head that I'd like to work through on the page, including some thoughts on stories past and present that would do me some good to address.
It feels good to get all this out onto a page, and I'd definitely recommend morning pages in general and 750 words in particular (they have badges, too!) to anyone who may be reading this who's also writing-inclined. And if you'd like to follow along with my little experiment, be warned: I haven't turned my inner editor off completely (I find that downright impossible, and I think it's made my rewrites less painful), but I'm not going to be going through everything I write with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it's actually worth reading or even grammatically correct. (Granted, I don't suppose many bloggers do this anyways, but I digress) I'll try to excise anything that's obviously me just trying to fill words, so not every published entry may make it all the way to 750, which is probably for the best. And if you are reading, please feel free to go ahead and comment! It always helps to know that I'm not just hurling all these words into the abyss. Even so, the abyss is still better than keeping my ideas in my head, where they'll quickly fester and fade. When they're on the page they have a way of multiplying, regardless of who ever actually sees that page.
