Blowing off the dust of a long-neglected blog is how many of my posts start. Ever since I wrote a 20-page story about a hamster out for blood in fourth grade, I've fancied the idea of being a writer. Not necessarily a world-famous writer or a successful writer or even a published writer, but simply someone who has ideas and puts them on paper. And so I carried around little notebooks and sketchpads and golf pencils everywhere I went, intermittently for the better part of my public school years. It helped that this also encapsulated my cargo pants phase, so there was always a pocket for items to help commit whatever inspiration struck me to paper. Needless to say, these efforts ended with little more than a few scribbles which were swiftly recycled in a fit of self-loathing. The problem, I began to think, was paper. While the idea of keeping a journal or diary seems romantic, my penmanship is so miserable and my patience with it so short that writing more than a few quick sentences was (and still is) difficult, even when trying to keep a travel journal for my time in New Zealand.
Thus, I turned to blogs, of which this is my fourth. Like the others, this one was started with the best of intentions, then squirrelled away out of fear and embarrassment.
A friend of mine gave me some creative advice a few years ago that temporarily spurred me on to greater creative output: make a bet with someone that you can write/draw/paint/dance every day. Nothing huge, $5, $20, but that little added incentive can be just the boost you need to keep going. "I'm tired and self-sabotaging today. Instead of writing, I'll watch Netflix. But wait, that will cost me $20! Might as well drag my fingers to the keyboard or pull out a pen and jot something down, anything." Though this worked for a little while, I ultimately became dissatisfied with the quality of my output (1 sentence per day about nothing in particular), and quit unceremoniously.
I've done some further reflecting on the problem and a recent revelation has made me decide to give it another shot. That revelation: the license to fuck up. I was reading a book of essays by David Sedaris while waiting for a flight and got to an unusually long section about his life as a smoker and his successful attempt at quitting. The second part of this chronicle was broken down into daily journal entries from the time he and his partner moved to Tokyo for three months in the hopes that a change of scenery would help facilitate kicking the cigarettes. The impression is given in other essays within the same book that Sedaris writes in his journal on a daily basis, and I was a touch confused when the Tokyo chapter of his smoking saga contained only sparse entries. Sporadic though they were, each was polished and humorous and insightful and ready for publication. Even so, not all of the entries pertained directly to smoking. This may seem obvious to many other people, but it was illuminating to me: not every word David Sedaris has ever written has been a polished, finished product ready to hit the pages of a best-selling book. Some of them are utter shite. Non-nonsensical half-thoughts that never see the light of day. Works in progress that need a little fine-tuning before being offered up to an editor or publisher.
This simple thought snowballed with an expectation of myself that I have been attempting to break for many years (and still am): not everything has to be perfect the first time. That's how people get better, but trying something, failing miserably, and trying to do a little better next time. Occasionally the planets align and a first attempt meets with much acclaim and adoration, but there's a reason this phenomenon is called "beginner's luck." To be consistently successful, one must practice. And even then, you'll put your free kick above the crossbar in front of millions of viewers or cut yourself making a sandwich in the privacy of your galley kitchen. That's the way people work.
For an embarrassingly long time, I've had a nagging belief that being from a healthy, well-educated and generally charmed background meant that there was some innate skill behind what I could do successfully and that a string of failures meant that I was simply not meant for the task at hand and should concentrate my energies elsewhere. So many missed opportunities and wasted hours, living in fear that an attempt at something new would result in humiliating failure and immediate hatred of the task at hand. If only I had been wise enough to embrace those fears as normal, and admit to the need to practice something new to attain any sort of aptitude.
That's the philosophy I'm pursuing going forward with my writing. I'm making no pretensions that every entry will be long, well-considered, well-written, or even kept at a professional distance. I make no promises to mask the identities of the people involved in some of my stories, though I won't go out of my way to give up the secrets of everyone I've met. I simply don't foresee having the energy to make convincing pseudonyms that I can keep straight later.
I'm also allowing myself to be personal. A lot of this will be about me and my journey. Some attempts may be made at fiction or character sketches or even full stories, but for the most part observation, however childish and silly, is the name of the game. I'm putting it into a blog as I'd like some security that I won't lose what I'm deciding to dedicate a significant amount of time to, and because the public nature of it (including my one follower, thanks Andrew) can serve as a motivator to be truthful and come out with the details.
In my past blogging life I have tried to form an identity or an edge to what I am writing by either going beyond the everyday and trying to share too much information or be shocking or different, or by going in the opposite direction and filling the internet with more of the literary equivalent of tapioca pudding.
Most of what I write I hope to put into words coherent enough to be read and entertaining enough to be pursued, following the example of Mr. Sedaris, but I make no claim that it will be anything brilliant or groundbreaking, but I'll try my darndest to make it honest, even if only for my own sake.
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