About one year into its existence, My Mental Milkcrate started to become less about my life than about my writing. Some time after that, I remember making a series of decisions about the kind of writing I would post. That I would not censor myself on the basis of good/bad or how successfully I thought I had conveyed an idea. That I would allow reactions, even if (perhaps especially if) they took the piss out of my writer-ego. That I would not allow my potential audience to limit the expression of my ideas (which is the one I’m still struggling with).
For a couple of years, for one reason or another, I got sloppy about writing at all, even in my catch-all space. But writing has always been important to me. Especially creative writing. I have always been imaginative, and I have always loved the written word. There was no way I could not be a part of it. I recently came the conclusion that I needed to commit to it irrevocably because of the way I look at the world and because of the way I relate to words. Which means, for now, simply making it important enough to supplant other activities.
I write for a blog because it’s instantly gratifying, the content is mostly under my control, and it isn’t isolated. I write more meticulously and the ideas flow more easily when I’m writing for someone. And I do write for specific people; my favourite advice from Kurt Vonnegut is to always write for someone specific (I think he wrote for his sister). The sense of community and the exchange of ideas is also vital to me for any kind of development as a writer. I’m not sure I ever want to come up with something truly original (if it’s even possible), but I do want to take part in the great historical conversation of literature.
I am not objective about what I write. Objectivity is not one of my goals, and I don’t think it is necessarily the best thing for an author. I do strive to be detached and to allow criticism, even if I outright reject the criticism. I put effort into what I write, I know when I’ve put the words exactly where I wanted them, and dammit, I will take satisfaction in my work. But then, no one asked me to be self-effacing. It’s a silly leftover habit.
The inspiration (and title) for this tirade was taken from a post by melograna at Complicity. I have to admit my reaction took a totally different flavour than I meant it to when I first read the post this morning. In my attitudes towards writing, I’ve struggled, and I think come to terms, with just about every point that was made.
I do have a quarrel with one of melograna’s points: I do not believe it is self-indulgent to “write what [you] want to, and then offer it up to others”. It is a great writing exercise to write something you don’t want to or to impose a form on your writing or to write for absolute clarity, but it is not self-indulgent to allow ambiguity to enter your work if the words you used captured what you meant them to. That, to me, is the ultimate goal of a writer: to hit the balance between conveyance and conveyed. To say, “To Hell with the audience” in the writing while permitting their interpretations in the reading. Furthermore, to pretend that a blog, of all places, should be something more than your personal writing playground if that’s what you want it to be is… well, foreign to me. Naval-gazing, self-indulgence: these are useless concepts to me. You are putting whatever you choose out into the murky-misty Internet. This is your claim and you do not have to justify its borders (though you may have to defend them once in a while).
Ultimately, as a writer who has a blog (as opposed to a straight-up blogger), your responsibility is to what you have committed to writing. I want to stitch together phrases sometimes just for the way they sound, but often I want to share a momentary impression or a corner of my imaginary world. And always, I put myself in command and at the mercy of my beloved words.
