Abandoning profundity as a blog requirement

I'm still here, and an apology is clearly in order. I started this blog, then let it die. Nothing too unusual there, as I've seen stats indicating a great many blogs are began and then abandoned. That makes my neglect worse, somehow, because I knew that going in and didn't want to be someone who did that.

But life interfered in the form of a class I enrolled in for work (which took over my life much more than I'd expected) along with some other distractions. (Including a belief that when time was at a premium, actually writing was more important than blogging about writing.)

And then, too, part of the problem was my own expectations: I felt a writing blog, by an aspiring writer, should be Profound. Should have something more valuable to say than "I wrote today" (or not.) Since most of the time, profundity on my part is off hiding with the muse, that made it hard to come up with posts, too.

But if I'm lacking in profound thoughts about writing, I have lots of questions. So as I renew my commitment to the blog, I confess it's probably going to be more musing about those questions than anything else. Hopefully, either through the writing of the questions themselves, or in the comments made by others (assuming anyone is still reading this) I'll find clues to the answers.

To blog or not to blog...

A friend who knew I was considering creating a writing blog sent me the following link today, to Robin Hobb's blog:

http://robinhobb.com/rant.html

It's a wonderful post, and she makes a lot of good points. It is easy to let a blog distract you from writing. But that's true of many other things, as well. At least for me.

There are days when I want to write, when the words and ideas flow, and I enjoy the whole process.

And then there are the days when nothing works, and I try one thing after another, writing and rewriting a single scene or sentence, hoping I'll stumble onto something that pleases me, something that feels right. On those days, I can be distracted by flossing my teeth, let alone blogging.

I've heard writers say you have to write whether you feel like it or not, that discipline is necessary whether it's going well and you feel inspired, or not. And I think there's some truth to that. Certainly, published authors writing to deadline have to be disciplined regardless of how things are going.

But on the other hand, sometimes I fight and fight and finally give up, bloodied and bowed by the process...only to have the answer come when I've gone away to do something else. How does that work? What's the relationship between discipline on the one hand and giving yourself mental space enough for ah-ha moments to break through on the other?

I don't know. But I do know that sometimes blogging about writing can soothe that panic that I'm never going to have another ah-ha moment, that the story is stupid, or lost, or whatever the fear of the day is. It's not a substitute for actually writing the story. But I think it can be part of the process.

Chasing the Muse

And here we are. It's worth noting that I don't have any grandiose plans for this blog. I hope to post something here once or twice a week; I hope people occasionally read and respond to such.

Mostly, it occurred to me a few days ago that I've been posting thoughts on writing on my livejournal, and that while I enjoyed the discussions (indeed, getting feedback from others about the things I was pondering was the entire point of making the posts) I wanted that blog to remain more personal.

So consider this more an experiment than anything else.