Why Blog?

I have never been a dedicated blogger, never had my own blog, and never blogged on any kind of regular basis. But that’s all going to change. Starting now. Call this a new year’s resolution. Up to now, the biggest challenge was not so much a focus for my blog, but, rather, a title for my blog. I knew I wanted to blog about writing, but every title I came up with was taken, even the one I was most partial to: Just Another Writing Blog. After all, a quick Google search will yield a gazillion blogs about writing. Wow, I thought, how was I going to come up with a unique title? Then it hit me: WOW! W. O. W. Writing on writing. Talk about serendipity. Wow!

For years while teaching creative writing, I required students to keep a journal to warehouse their ideas for stories and poems and essays. Each week they dutifully composed entries and several times during the semester, I collected and read the journals. The problem I saw, year after year, was that the entries, even for the better students, became lackluster, perfunctory. They were recorded for the sake of recording them. I have long ago abandoned writing regularly in a journal for the same basic reason—no real audience. The words lived and died within the covers of the journal, forever private.

Blogging has changed all that. No longer are one’s words left in the proverbial writer’s drawer. For better or for worse, anyone’s words can join the wonderful cacophony of other voices in the bloggersphere. The potential for a readership exists with others who have similar interests, and even though we writers still write alone, we can all easily become part of a larger community and perhaps find greater purpose in what we put down in words.