#3. What is writing and journaling all about, for me?
Now to that business about a writing venue. It calls for a bit of background, so that you understand how I see this blog and why I'm going at it as I am - which I suspect is somewhat different than most of what happens on LJ. I'd love to be in touch with anyone who can show me otherwise, but my take on this journaling site, so far, is that it's not for any deep thinking.
To me, journaling is a waste of time if it avoids any measure of serious thought. I was out of the chat scene just about as quickly as I was into it, when I saw that it had nothing to do with serious dialogue; and I've had little to do with newsgroups unless there was some evidence of meaningful discussion going on. Daily life is already so full of useless words blowing in the wind, that their enhancement by electronic device is an improvement I can live without.
Which doesn't mean I can't appreciate small talk and humor, I just don't want it at a top-heavy ratio. Language and the ability to communicate is a gift of the gods, and like any gift it comes with a few strings attached - if we wish to keep the flow of gifts coming. That's a rule that I just made up, but it seems like a pretty good one.
Writing is a double gift, really. It's first of all a gift to the one who does it; and then it can be a second gift to the one who reads it. And by doing it better and better, prompting more and more folks to read it, the gift simply keeps on going, maybe endlessly. There is no such promise in small talk.
But I think age has a lot to do with this perspective - age, and what its accumulation does to our way and level of thinking. When I first set out to be a writer, before I was twenty, I was entirely into writing humor. I still like to inject humor into what I write, but to make a passion of it has come to seem rather pointless to me. My outlook changed when I came to realize what writing was really capable of doing.
That happened much later in my life - like when I reached my mid-40s, and found myself actually driven to start recording what was going on with me, each day. It began as an evening journal, at a time when my life was undergoing tremendous turbulence. I was prompted to try it by a rewarding read of Eric Hoffer's published journals. It wasn't long before I realized that the thoughts and feelings I was pouring onto paper every evening were things I hadn't even realized I was thinking about, or felt so deeply about. So that the writing was literally speaking to me.
I then came to see it as a true dialogue, carried on between my outer and inner selves. And it proved to be extremely, marvelously therapeutic. I still maintained the dream of becoming a freelance writer, but I was coming to see the gift of writing in an entirely different light - and one that eventually became the full motif of my writing life.
Within a few more years - and a bit of actual freelancing success along the way - I began putting out a counter-culture periodical called Black Bart (its short name), and it soon opened even more dimensions of writing for me. For one thing, I became captivated by its potential for bringing about dialogue with other people (its readers, of course), and that led directly to my making of it a much more personal expression than had originally been intended. It became, in fact, a public chronicle of where my path-following life was taking me.
So much so, that when the time came to end it, about a septide after it had begun, I could not simply close off the channel of communication. I stayed in touch with perhaps a couple hundred of its old readers with an ongoing series of newsletters, some under the old Black Bart rubric, but eventually on an entirely personal basis.
It was very clear, by now, that writing had become my way of relating to the people I knew. I wrote about my world for them, the remarkable things that my remarkable life was showing me, and apparently in a way that enriched the people I wrote it for. The idea of writing for money continued to prod me from time to time, but with never the force of just writing because I had to write. I had my readers, and that was all the incentive I ever really needed.
Their continuing interest in what I wrote was due in large part, I'm sure, to the non-standard life that I was writing my 'dispatches' about. I was living, to a large extent, 'on the edge' of our conventional world, appealing to some of them no doubt vicariously, and to others simply for my perceptions of things they were not in a position to see. Many of them helped to support this wayward life I led with personal donations, but it was not a pre-requisite for remaining on my mailing-list - though I did require that they stay in touch, for communication had to go both ways.
In due time, I relocated from California's Bay Area to the Northwest, around Puget Sound, eventually settling in Seattle, and finally completing my long-on-hold education at the University of Washington. While there, the University Daily became my writing venue, for a total of some forty weekly columns, ranging into whatever topic I chose to write about. Then I went off to Europe for 19 months, which eventuated in a self-published book on the experience. (Innocence Abroad, and I have it on my web site). I briefly sought a 'regular publisher' for it, but I was too far out of the mainstream for any such connection - I would not play the publisher games it might have required.
I tend to think that we erect 'energy webs' around our lives, over the course of time as we follow our separate life-paths. Webs as insubstantial, in one sense, as a spider's, but as fully supportive of our arrived-at way of life, in the long run, as is the self-same spider's own finely woven mesh. I don't miss the financial reward that most writers seem to feel is the bottom line; my own view is that I thrive as well or better without it.
When the book was done, I decided I needed a fresh, new venue and I created one called Ripening Seasons, tailored precisely to my needs (which included a comfortable means for responding to the continuing flood of correspondence I had to deal with). It was what is usually called a zine, but I've never thought much of that term. Usually six full pages of commentary on whatever was upfront for me, coming out anywhere from three to eight times a year. Over the span of another full septide (my eleventh), I turned out 49 issues of Ripening Seasons before it, too, seemed to have run its course.
It was time for me to turn my writing passion toward a full-life personal memoir, to be titled A Seasoned Life - the Spring season of it already nearly complete. And I'd have been happy to stick with that, had not the sprout for this venue called LiveJournal suddenly come in on me, as I've already detailed in my entry #1. I didn't think I needed another venue, but apparently my inner spirit thinks I do . . . and I don't argue with my inner spirit.
So now we can get back to the question of what I think I ought to be doing with this venue, this journal. And I'll pick that question up when I next return to it.
Go to Entry #4
To me, journaling is a waste of time if it avoids any measure of serious thought. I was out of the chat scene just about as quickly as I was into it, when I saw that it had nothing to do with serious dialogue; and I've had little to do with newsgroups unless there was some evidence of meaningful discussion going on. Daily life is already so full of useless words blowing in the wind, that their enhancement by electronic device is an improvement I can live without.
Which doesn't mean I can't appreciate small talk and humor, I just don't want it at a top-heavy ratio. Language and the ability to communicate is a gift of the gods, and like any gift it comes with a few strings attached - if we wish to keep the flow of gifts coming. That's a rule that I just made up, but it seems like a pretty good one.
Writing is a double gift, really. It's first of all a gift to the one who does it; and then it can be a second gift to the one who reads it. And by doing it better and better, prompting more and more folks to read it, the gift simply keeps on going, maybe endlessly. There is no such promise in small talk.
But I think age has a lot to do with this perspective - age, and what its accumulation does to our way and level of thinking. When I first set out to be a writer, before I was twenty, I was entirely into writing humor. I still like to inject humor into what I write, but to make a passion of it has come to seem rather pointless to me. My outlook changed when I came to realize what writing was really capable of doing.
That happened much later in my life - like when I reached my mid-40s, and found myself actually driven to start recording what was going on with me, each day. It began as an evening journal, at a time when my life was undergoing tremendous turbulence. I was prompted to try it by a rewarding read of Eric Hoffer's published journals. It wasn't long before I realized that the thoughts and feelings I was pouring onto paper every evening were things I hadn't even realized I was thinking about, or felt so deeply about. So that the writing was literally speaking to me.
I then came to see it as a true dialogue, carried on between my outer and inner selves. And it proved to be extremely, marvelously therapeutic. I still maintained the dream of becoming a freelance writer, but I was coming to see the gift of writing in an entirely different light - and one that eventually became the full motif of my writing life.
Within a few more years - and a bit of actual freelancing success along the way - I began putting out a counter-culture periodical called Black Bart (its short name), and it soon opened even more dimensions of writing for me. For one thing, I became captivated by its potential for bringing about dialogue with other people (its readers, of course), and that led directly to my making of it a much more personal expression than had originally been intended. It became, in fact, a public chronicle of where my path-following life was taking me.
So much so, that when the time came to end it, about a septide after it had begun, I could not simply close off the channel of communication. I stayed in touch with perhaps a couple hundred of its old readers with an ongoing series of newsletters, some under the old Black Bart rubric, but eventually on an entirely personal basis.
It was very clear, by now, that writing had become my way of relating to the people I knew. I wrote about my world for them, the remarkable things that my remarkable life was showing me, and apparently in a way that enriched the people I wrote it for. The idea of writing for money continued to prod me from time to time, but with never the force of just writing because I had to write. I had my readers, and that was all the incentive I ever really needed.
Their continuing interest in what I wrote was due in large part, I'm sure, to the non-standard life that I was writing my 'dispatches' about. I was living, to a large extent, 'on the edge' of our conventional world, appealing to some of them no doubt vicariously, and to others simply for my perceptions of things they were not in a position to see. Many of them helped to support this wayward life I led with personal donations, but it was not a pre-requisite for remaining on my mailing-list - though I did require that they stay in touch, for communication had to go both ways.
In due time, I relocated from California's Bay Area to the Northwest, around Puget Sound, eventually settling in Seattle, and finally completing my long-on-hold education at the University of Washington. While there, the University Daily became my writing venue, for a total of some forty weekly columns, ranging into whatever topic I chose to write about. Then I went off to Europe for 19 months, which eventuated in a self-published book on the experience. (Innocence Abroad, and I have it on my web site). I briefly sought a 'regular publisher' for it, but I was too far out of the mainstream for any such connection - I would not play the publisher games it might have required.
I tend to think that we erect 'energy webs' around our lives, over the course of time as we follow our separate life-paths. Webs as insubstantial, in one sense, as a spider's, but as fully supportive of our arrived-at way of life, in the long run, as is the self-same spider's own finely woven mesh. I don't miss the financial reward that most writers seem to feel is the bottom line; my own view is that I thrive as well or better without it.
When the book was done, I decided I needed a fresh, new venue and I created one called Ripening Seasons, tailored precisely to my needs (which included a comfortable means for responding to the continuing flood of correspondence I had to deal with). It was what is usually called a zine, but I've never thought much of that term. Usually six full pages of commentary on whatever was upfront for me, coming out anywhere from three to eight times a year. Over the span of another full septide (my eleventh), I turned out 49 issues of Ripening Seasons before it, too, seemed to have run its course.
It was time for me to turn my writing passion toward a full-life personal memoir, to be titled A Seasoned Life - the Spring season of it already nearly complete. And I'd have been happy to stick with that, had not the sprout for this venue called LiveJournal suddenly come in on me, as I've already detailed in my entry #1. I didn't think I needed another venue, but apparently my inner spirit thinks I do . . . and I don't argue with my inner spirit.
So now we can get back to the question of what I think I ought to be doing with this venue, this journal. And I'll pick that question up when I next return to it.
Go to Entry #4