Learning to Write
Blogging is new to me…and writing is something that I have rarely done for any length of time…so I have decided to try my hand and ‘join the crowd’. I have written the odd article over my lifetime – usually for a purpose such as an essay or to answer questions for a course or project. Years would go by in between such writing episodes.
However, one thing I have noticed is how much I have loved writing my friends by email, once I got into it over twelve years ago. It all began with a new love in my life (a long distance one) – that was enough to light a fire under me, at that time, and get me joining the email crowd.
Now, I don’t seem to have such a compelling reason to overcome my hesitation to write about myself. I know that blogging is more often used for marketing products than for writing about oneself (and I do have some products that I would recommend because of what they have done for me). However, for now, that’s not on my mind. What is on my mind is learning to write in order to share what has gone on in my life – particularly about my health – in a way that could help my readers with their own health concerns.
But just because something is a “good” idea isn’t enough to make it happen. I found this out when I next sat down to write. It took me a few weeks to draw something out of me – and so my first blog post came into being. However, try as I might, another blog didn’t come out of me again…until over a year later. Then I pulled a couple of smaller ones out of me, early in the new year. Then another dry spell – although it is probably a misnomer to describe it as “dry” when I hadn’t even come close to getting “wet”! lol
One thing led to another. I changed my focus to creating a CD with my views on health – and it seemed that I had best write about it first, and when I was satisfied with the flow of my ideas, then I would turn it into a CD. Well, nothing flowed…I started a paragraph or two…and then got stuck. It seemed that if I wrote either pragmatically or philosophically about “health”, I became hung up – and even a bit bored.
Along the way, I became curious how my health was in different stages of my life, so I opened up a new page in my computer and proceeded to write all the years of my life down the left margin. Some years, as I was writing down their number, a story jumped right out of me, and I was compelled to write it down, right then (because I had had the idea of writing all the years down – all 73 of them, from 1938 to 2012 – before writing any stories). I soon gave up that idea, and after that, if a story jumped as I wrote its year, I wrote about it right then – when it was still hot. I have never looked back from that moment.
I guess what I learned was that for me, an idea can’t be esoteric – I have to be able to re-live it, whatever that looks like. For me, it seems that remembering what I was doing at a particular time in my life, is a necessary ingredient. That might change at a later stage of my writing, but that’s the way it is – at least for now.
I have been passionate about my health…since I almost lost it…and that’s another story….