How tortured I am. How tempting, when I've found the perfect quote or excerpt or parable or story or epic to demonstrate to you my current state of mind, to simply post it and let it be done. Even a series of annotations would do little to satisfy my ambition, but how can I improve on the glorious words of others? I'll just throw out some links, and let you peruse them to our mutual satisfaction:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (my favorite sections are 47-48)
Together, these two works form a whirling dervish of individualism that actually strikes me as somewhat obnoxious, but I am no less a slave to the overall sentiments expressed for it (sometimes contradictory though they may be).
These works are large (they contain multitudes). I can't possibly express to you all of my various reactions. I will react, instead, to the idea of writing at large, and hope I might expand on this at a later date.
I realize that I am a writer in search of a voice. I mean, I have something of a voice, but it's not quite the well-worn, comfortable identity I'm looking for. One of the Great Purposes of this blog is to give me a chance to practice and enhance my writing; to that end, I try to pursue a lot of different subjects and, to a lesser extent, styles. Despite the term, "finding" a voice isn't as much a matter of discovery as it is one of development. And I think I'm getting there. All things in time.
I noticed that sort of development with my playwright challenge last month -- as the days passed, I could tell that I was building a better sense for what goes into writing a play. That didn't mean that all my plays were necessarily better as the month went on, but I felt a lot more confident writing them. A confident mistake is far better than a tentative one.
It's not exactly the same with my blog -- after all, I have a great deal more experience writing blog posts than plays -- but I can feel a similar arc transpiring this month. I think I'm putting a lot more of myself into these posts than I did last year, and I like the results. Writing has ceased to be a slog for me, and transformed instead into a pleasant delight, full of interesting challenges and too many alluring paths to take. It's truly reached the point of being a habit more than an obligation; a break, more than a task; what was once Sisyphean has given way to the Elysian. Perhaps it is the way of all things.
With this feeling of being accustomed, I'm not sure that the challenge is such a good idea. Depending on how blogging goes over the next year, I may set aside this monthly challenge altogether; I may feel that there's no point, if I'm blogging regularly enough anyway. What good is a challenge that you know you can accomplish? And anyway, I'm not so sure I like the idea of such a challenge; for the purpose of setting you to a task you wouldn't do normally, I can see the reason behind it. But blogging is something that I'm meant to be doing anyway. Challenging myself to do it more seems like a sad attempt at making up for a lack that's totally natural, like covering the nakedness of a mountain. If I have nothing to write, so be it; I'd rather stand honestly, holding my empty pen, than force myself to find words without any meaning.
Really, this is my reaction to feeling like, with this challenge, I'm discouraged from writing two blog posts in one day; sometimes I have that much to write! It's silly to space it out when I have more to say, and it's silly to squeeze it together when I don't. Thanks for putting up with my silliness; let's all look forward to the time when I write daily because I want to, and not because I've shackled myself to a standard that does little but encourage me to resent writing altogether, and draw forth mediocrity in place of honest silence.
No comments:
Post a Comment