I've re-established contact with so many friends through the facebook medium that it's hard to tear myself away for the subtle but intellectually satisfying activity of blogging.
I know...you're scratching your head over "intellectually satisfying" and "blogging" in the same sentence. Actually it is...and you just KNOW you're in for a dissertation on the joys of blog
ging...I won't disappoint.A friend of mine is a successful author. He is successful not in the sense that many or maybe even any of you have heard his name; nor are you likely to walk into your local mega-books store and see a display of his works on the featured book shelf, but he is successful in the sense that he has made a reasonable living and put two kids through college on the proceeds from his writings. Like a lot of people, I once entertained fantasies about becoming an author and knew, deep in my soul, that my personal experiences, my life story, once put on paper would be utterly resistible to the reading public and I would be catapulted to fame and glory as the author of a New York Times Best Seller.
I did mention the word "fantasy", right?
In pursuit of this dream, I invested in the cost of couple of cups of Coffee and invited this author to review my work and offer his wisdom.
Looking back, he was extremely kind: kind in the sense that he kept a straight face while he read excerpts of my works.
He did, kindly enough, offer some words of wisdom about the work of writing. He said that it required the highest degree of self discipline one could muster. There is no boss to shoo you away from the water cooler (or refrigerator if you're operating out of your home.) and, unless you are working under a contract to produce works on a specific subject at a specific time, there is no editor to hound you to meet deadlines.
He also said that it is the most solitary of jobs. I think he meant that in a way that would indicate that if you're a "people person", writing may not be for you, and, at that time, that's the way I took it. But I've learned another context.
You're alone with your thoughts as you transcribe them from the mush between your ears to something more permanent...like paper...or nowadays, the unknowable permanency of the glorious ozone known as the Internet. When those thoughts become so immortalized they are stripped naked of the context of your personal experiences, prejudices, contexts and stand alone for all to interpret as they may wish with the "normal" meaning of words being applied to them. They must not be misunderstood or else the entire point of your enterprise is lost. And you are there, alone, to see your thoughts in all that nakedness for the first time. Nakedness can be ugly and by association, so can your thoughts and that is difficult to deal with.
At times I have found myself talking out loud to the post I had written as if it were another person in the room with me. I've said to that post: "No! That's not it! That's not what I meant at all!"
More than once I have deleted whole posts on this blog because I discovered in myself hidden prejudices or fallacies in reasoning that I would have denied I possessed but the words betrayed my denial. Thoughts are crystallized and refined until they reach a sharper point than you knew existed. Quite fortunately, there are times when the thoughts are so crystallized, refined, distilled that you find that the point you were trying to make is not worth making at all.
There is something deeply satisfying about NOT making a fool of yourself just as there is in making a brilliant, insightful, point.
Okay...it is for me...pick your own reason.
