I thought about writing today.

[flintlock]

The result was immediate indigestion and malingering nausea. No, this was no ambitious thought or mind toward my more lofty of projects-the endless worlds and journal after journal of unpublished world notes and character drabbles-nor was it guilt felt in the direction of my many, many unanswered tags. What crossed my mind during the subsequent

Comments

[soulpoem]

Journaling has been redefined as writing pithy 140 character statements on Twitter about what colour underwear you’re wearing today, and what day of the week you intend to change said pair.

I feel the same way about microblogging sites in general. Although I'm still on Plurk, I basically only stay there in order to see what people are saying and not because I actually want to microblog. 140 characters? Heh, it takes a lot more than that for me to say something!

I remember how I 'insulted' people once with a post of mine, so I'd agree on how people nowadays take their scribbles a little too seriously. That being said, I've always felt like your writing style doesn't help you at all at a site like LJ... unless you're able to find friends who do blog extensively instead of writing 500-word variants of underwear changing. I'd make the effort, but I find it a lot easier to contribute by making pretty layouts than by writing things that people would skip over discussions of their Ship of the Week. :|

[flintlock]

And that you satisfy that need for creation - contribution. Something tangible that you are able to share with friends and receive praise for from strangers. That's what I'm looking for, although in a different avenue and medium since I don't believe layout creation on LJ is really for me. After the personal webspace/blog era, where we made and created elaborate and complex websites out of artbook scans, I just find the LJ layout code to be too restricting. No less worthwhile, but just not for me

[soulpoem]

I thought of going into that, but I'm horridly incompetent when it comes to any sort of graphic making past icons and I can't pay for web hosting. Still, I did learn a lot of useful codes that I'll be able to use in the future so it's not too much of a lost cause

[bassist_159]

In my experience, writing is what lets those hidden pathways be traversed in a rather cathartic open setting, and that if one worries about what others might think, one cheapens the experience. Then again, I subscribe to the theory that true writers, to a certain extent, live alone in their heads, ever-so-subtly separated from the rest of the world. Thus to worry about what others might say is meaningless; there wasn't anything your work needed from them to begin with.

So, to put it bluntly: write it already. Who gives a fuck what other people think? Rilke made a career off of writing poems about being sad and unsatisfied and wanting more. We need more authors who can prove that loneliness is just as much as a part of the human condition as anything else, and your audience will either get it or they won't.

Also I too lament what Twitter and Facebook have done to journaling/blogging, but realize that for the most part, people have neither the time nor inclination to make it something more. Still, sad state of affairs indeed.