What do I know about writing? Not a damn thing, but I do it anyway. I used to write more freely than I do know, but I’m a better writer now, technically, than before. I used to have an audience of one: me. I wrote for my own sake, when I was my only reader, in a manner which was much less cautious and much more open about thoughts, feelings. I wrote in spiral notebooks, in ink, or sometimes in pencil; I wrote in cursive, and other times in printed letters. From 1976 through the early 1990s, I wrote sometimes daily, sometimes much less frequently. Journal writing kept me very much in touch with what was going on in my life. Today, however, as I write in this blog, I am very aware that I am no longer my only audience, and I find myself hesitating to write openly and freely as I once did. I sometimes struggle with composition of sentences, with word choice, with context, and my writing is more labored than it used to be. I often feel that the writings here are forced, and uninspired, or fail to do justice to the feelings I am trying to convey. I sometimes think that my writing is just shit.
Someone, a reader of some of the pieces I’ve written here, told me that my writing, in comparison to some other pieces written on other blogs, is “captivating” and “100 times better” than reading what feels like “really good homework from some high school kid.”
That’s fine, I guess, but I still don’t know. OK, so maybe my writing is better than some other stuff that’s out there, but it’s still not as good as I would like it to be – it’s still missing its voice. I need to find it again.
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