Blogging is giving me fits - doesn't mean I am ready to quit, but I put my aversion under the microscope, and this is what I saw. I'm not too busy or too lazy, I'm just not a first-drafter. Of all the things I've written, only once did I run with a first draft. I am a fifth-sixth-seventh draft person. I love to play with words, to pour over a thesaurus to capture the nuances of language. My first drafts are full of run-on sentences and sequential flaws; half-finished ideas and lots of marginal notes.
But my blogs entries are, esentially, first drafts . . . oh, and did I mention I used to hand write my first drafts? Keyboarding them is another beast altogether, though I am improving.
The blog sacrifices eloquence for authenticity. The entries seem unpolished, but that is the point. You capture the emotion with the first pass, and, so long as the entry is legible and mostly representative of the moment's reality, you've hit the mark.
I read two blogs regularly (one is now defunct). One is brilliant, and the other is absolutely banal. Now I know what lies behind my judgement and that is the perception that one is (was) completely contrived, containing only those things one was supposed to say, or feel, or do, in public. Boring as hell.
The other was raw and powerful - not because of the style of writing as I originally thought - but because of the level of exposure of the creator. And, equally important, the timliness of the posts.
I can't go back now and tell you how much election day rocked because that's not the point of the blog. The point is today, right now. It's okay to write about memories if that is where your head is when writing, but it is totally not okay to fake it.
My best hope is that my first-draft style improves. Better still, that I will be more "present" in my days in order to see things out of the ordinary to describe here. But, no pressure. If I have a boring day, I'll share it.
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