Okay, that’s pathetic: I haven’t updated this since May. Let me explain.
See, I got into a relationship in October, and it felt weird to post about it here. He doesn’t get what all this social media stuff is for, so understandably felt unsure about everyone, everywhere being instantly aware of what we were up to. But he never said “Don’t do it.”
I took the blog down anyway… until I reworked the site and thought it would be good to have someplace off the front page to babble. So, in addition to all the new stuff like the “DIY Book” section, I put the blog back — and proceeded to leave it blank. Hey, I was busy living!
I also wasn’t sure what to say. I’d liked the idea of a “business only” site — talk to the hanging sign — and couldn’t get my head back into the idea of sharing personal stuff. Now I was thinking, “What’s that for?”
While I was away on holidays this summer, I read Natalie Goldberg’s new book, Old Friend from Far Away, about memoir-writing. She’s the one who first inspired me to write, and while I have no intention to write my memoirs, her book reminded me how beautiful and magnetic real-world details are.
As a fiction writer, particularly once you start putting your work out into a hostile world, it’s easy to become too slick, to make everything a bit too glib and Teflon-y. A lot of beginning writers fall into what I call “validating your pain”, putting all their hurts and angst into their work, which, sorry, I find boring. As personal growth author John Bradshaw was once devastatingly told by his therapist, “John, your suffering is ordinary.”
But this is different. When Natalie Goldberg talks about a friend’s cooking, or the landscape of New Mexico, I am absolutely with her. The world tells you to stick with the plot, grab ’em with the first paragraph, make sure they don’t get a chance to be bored. Yet my editor once told me she liked my blog posts better than my books: there was an extra dose of me in them.
How do you strike a balance between vanity, catharsis, self-exploration, and the holy original details of daily human life?
I don’t know, but I’m back, and I am inspired to risk boring you by having the courage to experiment, not just put out slick finished works.
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