Writing, Blockage and Blogging
On Thursday, I read an article on 
by now former blogger Sarah Hepola. In the
, Hepola describes why she shut down the blog she had run for five years. She hoped to become a novelist and believed that writing in her blog would help bring that about. As she discovered, it didn't. It actually kept her from writing, feeling that "jokes and scenarios and turns of phrase were my capital, and that my capital was limited, and each blog entry was scattering more of it to the wind." She's now shut down her blog and is working on her novel.
It made me wonder: is my LiveJournal sabotaging my writing? I can remember the semester before I got my LJ, spring of '02, I would sit in African-American Religion every Tuesday and Thursday and just write and write. It was Harry Potter fanfic, but it was still writing. I got myself a LJ for my birthday that year, so that would be September, and since then, I can't remember being able to just sit and write like that. I've developed this strange complex about having everything I write be perfect. Now, I'm all for editing and one of the vital concepts of doing that is polishing the rough bits and making them all shiny. But now I just want everything to come directly out of my brain, through my fingers and onto the screen in perfect, polished conditions. And it doesn't work like that. I know that, I can think about it logically, but when I start writing, or trying to write, it's just like everything locks up.
I'm thinking I might take a break from LiveJournal in May. No worrying about posting, no wasting time typing up pointless little entries no one reads instead of sitting down and writing. Just writing. Whether it's crap or not, whether it has anything to do with my novel ideas or not. Just...writing. Writing on the computer and in notebooks and when I'm supposed to be doing other things and when I have nothing else to do.
So, what do you say?
by now former blogger Sarah Hepola. In the
, Hepola describes why she shut down the blog she had run for five years. She hoped to become a novelist and believed that writing in her blog would help bring that about. As she discovered, it didn't. It actually kept her from writing, feeling that "jokes and scenarios and turns of phrase were my capital, and that my capital was limited, and each blog entry was scattering more of it to the wind." She's now shut down her blog and is working on her novel.
It made me wonder: is my LiveJournal sabotaging my writing? I can remember the semester before I got my LJ, spring of '02, I would sit in African-American Religion every Tuesday and Thursday and just write and write. It was Harry Potter fanfic, but it was still writing. I got myself a LJ for my birthday that year, so that would be September, and since then, I can't remember being able to just sit and write like that. I've developed this strange complex about having everything I write be perfect. Now, I'm all for editing and one of the vital concepts of doing that is polishing the rough bits and making them all shiny. But now I just want everything to come directly out of my brain, through my fingers and onto the screen in perfect, polished conditions. And it doesn't work like that. I know that, I can think about it logically, but when I start writing, or trying to write, it's just like everything locks up.
I'm thinking I might take a break from LiveJournal in May. No worrying about posting, no wasting time typing up pointless little entries no one reads instead of sitting down and writing. Just writing. Whether it's crap or not, whether it has anything to do with my novel ideas or not. Just...writing. Writing on the computer and in notebooks and when I'm supposed to be doing other things and when I have nothing else to do.
So, what do you say?