This blogging thing is sort of like trying on bathing suits and having the mirror located somewhere in the middle of the mall – it’s terrifying. Sure most of my most private parts are still covered but enough is on display to invite ridicule.
I like one piece suits — large and black. I like them to give the optical illusion of thinness. I’m not big into displaying myself and yet I am compelled to do a virtual striptease with my writing.
Even in the wildest of fiction a writer’s true self is on display – how they love, what they fear, what is important to them. All these things are central to how a story appears on the page. We think, fear, love the same on Mars as we do in our own back yard. The ‘who’ we are as people shows up in our words and in the actions of characters we create.
I’m currently immersed in writing short essays about the nothings of my life (my cousin’s word – “you take nothing and turn it into a story,” she said during a recent phone call). I’m having a lot of fun doing it – I’m celebrating my own weirdness. I’ve been accused of looking at the world from an odd angle – unsurprising really, I’m a bit left of center. But every time I publish a piece on my blog my insecurities do a war dance.
I’m not a terrific speller – my iPad has a hay day with some of the words I type (sometimes artificial intelligence can’t even figure out what I’m trying to say and yet it can calculate the shortest route to galaxies far away). My punctuation is atrocious. And yet I persist.
It’s not like I have anything important to say – I am the least profound person I know. I don’t have ready answers to even the most innocent questions. My granddaughter asked me the other day if horses wiped their bums. Easy question right? Nope. The answer involved a complicated back and forth about bum wiping – who does, who doesn’t and who really should. (Apparently lamas definitely should).
I discovered something interesting relaying this discussion to my son — my answer really had nothing to do with the story – the question did.
So here’s the thing – my essays show up out of nowhere – the story is built on nothing – my punctuation sucks and my spelling is off the chart. I’m the perfect person to write a blog don’t you think? But it beats hell out of trying on bathing suits.