You wonder if anyone is listening, don’t you? That when your words reach the page, when the pixels of monitors all over the world display your name below a post title— are they listening? Will they respond? Or is this all just another devil of illusion, slowly milking the lie that you so desperately want to believe is the truth.
So what if it does give you a momentary high? Is it worth pining for? Maybe it’s not a Stephen King high, or a J.K. Rowling high— but when you’re a young writer who just wants to sculpt out a creative life for themselves, then a blog presents you with a nice moment of hope. But in truth, for the majority of such youth, it is empty. I remember reading last February of how you could get a job from your blog. That must be a fractional percentage at best. But again, it was hope. A minor shred to cling to.
I’ve spent over nine months making periodic contributions to a mass-blogger site. Thirty-seven posts worth in that time, a number that others do in a month. This passage you’re reading right now was my six-hundredth comment there, again achieved in a month by some. But comparisons and statistics prove nothing. It really comes down to motivations. The why.
For me, I never wanted to be a reporter. Or a reviewer. Or a debater. Oddly enough, I never really wanted to be a critic either, but it looks like my name will always be linked there for as long as they’re around and decide to keep archives. So be it. While my original goals in joining the site have been achieved. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t learn a lot from the experience from the types of writing I’d never done before: satire, pop culture, sci-tech, a sports article, and a book review. I even tried my hand at analyzing some political issues going on in NYC.
While I never garnered more than forty comments on any post, the reasons for writing them were always about branching out. That if you’ve been writing in a certain style for most of your life, you need to switch gears. Surprise yourself. Create a self-induced LOL. Sure, very little is guaranteed success once it reaches the real world. But who cares? It is really about the extension of self.
That site offers many ways to lose yourself in writing, commenting, praising, attacking, whatever. But the truth is that most people could give two shits about you and your life, outside of humoring you. Right now, there are twenty thousand people just like every last one of us living the same life within the same parameters. We think that we’re being original, but we’re just another copycat. Sure it’s inadvertent and innocent, but nevertheless completely true. If you weren’t dishing on the new alt-rock album or stating why a celebrity or sports star is a weasel, someone or some dozen people would be. We are all disposable.
So the biggest lesson I learned there was that before we can truly be critical of the world, we must learn to be self-critical. Instead of dissecting the world and its infinite faults, focus on why all of it bothers you. I’m writing all this now because outside of my original motivations, I’ve come to the conclusion that I too am guilty of being a copycat. It’s high time that the person I needed to have listening was myself.
I do not know what the future holds for my writing. I do not know if the 2nd novel outline I’m working on right now will ever see the light of day, or if I’ll stay stuck on an anonymous plateau like most writers do. But I have accepted my current state and am prepared to move on. Are you?