The Writer is Going to Write
Original First Post in Dreamwidth blog (May 2018 - June 2021)
Today I am 33.
As someone born in 1985, I am not *quite* a millennial. I am also not properly Gen X.
I am of the generation between these two, which has been given many names when it hasn't been entirely forgotten, a generation born in the span of a decade, or maybe less. We are the generation who knows what it was like Before the Internet, but was young enough to adopt the Internet in the After, to be savvy and skillful with it.
The markers of my generational peers are, I think, distinct.
We "get" Facebook and Twitter, having been some of the first to use both platforms, but we were also very good with DOS. We are comfortable with mobile phones, but haven't forgotten when the very idea of the newfangled answering machine (with the tiniest cassette tape possible) was seen as 'impersonal' by our parent's peer group. We don't hesitate to Google as a way to satiate our curiosity, but could just as easily navigate a microfiche newspaper clipping or the dewey decimal system to get to the answer to a question.
The Internet is part of our life, yes, but we remember when it wasn't. When it was new, we were teenagers—coming of age alongside this transformative new communication tool. In The Beginning, there was Yahoo and Hotmail, Altavista and Ask Jeeves, and if you fancied it, you could build your own website with Geocities.
Blogs weren't quite a thing yet, but livejournal and diaryland certainly were. Users of each had strong opinions about which was the best, although I was indifferent. I chose the latter, for no particular reason than I think the templates were more appealing to me.
I shared my teenage angst, my young ideals, the righteous indignation of a fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year old. Sometimes I shared a bit of fiction I was writing, sometimes a poem. I had a small audience. A handful of friends who would read my entries as I would read theirs. It was never quality, of course. I was a teenager. I had yet to refine my language, to appreciate nuance and see the world through a wider lens. But it was consistent. I wrote often. Multiple entries a week, often daily, in fact.
Seeing the change in how I used to write as a young adult compared to now, it’s actually quite easy to map what happened and why, these days, I write so much less despite my strong desire to write daily. My first steps into blogging were specifically to promote my art, and share my experience around it. After many years my blog became more ‘formal’ and the audience wider. As it moved from one platform to the next, the platforms also influenced the style. As much as I adore Medium for it’s easy to read set-up and the functionality that enables readers to engage by commenting in-line, it comes with an expectation of polished pieces—essays and news-like articles. All very well and good, and the sort of writing I do sometimes create, but not the only writing I do.
The pressure for perfection seems to go hand-in-hand with the pressure to achieve success in a very limited way. Which is to say, I write less because I am disheartened that I do not make a living from my writing. This is depressing, and immensely unhelpful. When I reframe it, and consider that I write as an expression of my humanity, as a way to deepen my practice as a Buddhist, and most importantly, because I take great joy in writing, then my success as a writer comes simply from writing, regardless of what happens to the writing afterwards.
Creating a new space for my writing on Dreamwidth is an experiment.
My hypothesis? I will write more when I have a space where A) I can manage the audience to some degree and B) the platform is more ‘personal blog’, less ‘Huffington Post’.
Not everything on Dreamwidth will always be public. Some of what I publish will be entirely public, while some will be for those on my access list (If you want to be added to this list, let me know in a personal message/text/phone call). I don’t yet know how I will manage it, but part of this will also be an opportunity to cultivate certain pieces so they do become those polished essays posted to Medium. It will also be a space where I might share some of my fiction, especially as I work on third and fourth drafts and re-writes and fresh eyes will help improve the work. It will also be a place to share some of the entries I wrote in my journal during my time on retreat.
It will be like the factory where the raw material comes out—trains of thought with no caboose, seeds of ideas I can’t quite articulate but am testing, digressions that turn into whole new pieces. A key aspect to being included in the access list is that feedback from you is not only welcome but encouraged.
This is my birthday present to myself, at thirty-three, as a way of creating space to share more of my writing.
I’m quite excited.