The Beginning
It’s taken me a while to figure out what I want my blog to be. For so long it’s been intermittent ramblings about my kids and my life and you know what – I’m just not that interested in me. Or, quite frankly, that interesting. I think what it was missing was focus, a subject matter that things could always return to. A homing device. I’ve been following blogs and the ones that I come back to over and over again are the ones where I know exactly what I’m going to get. Talking Points Memo for news, Dark UFO for LOST spoilers, Seth Godin for interesting angles on marketing, I Can Has Cheezburger for my daily cheer. (Okay, maybe LOLs aren’t technically blogging, but they’re focused, so, I’m giving it a pass.) The best blogs are the ones where the blogger talks about something they’ve got passion about, and everything they talk about relates back to that one thing.
So, I started thinking – what am I passionate about? It’s a silly question, I know. If you’re passionate about something, you should know what you’re passionate about, right? Well, my problem is – and always has been – that I tend to be wildly enthusiastic, and I have mistaken enthusiasm for passion more than once. For instance, I am wildly enthusiastic about writing, lap dogs, cute hair clips for my girls which they never wear but I buy anyway, chocolate, the unattainability of guilt-free parenting, baked Cheetos, LOLcats, natural remedies, handmade paper, Macbooks, television, marriage rights for same-sex couples, Colin Firth, carrots, knitting… well, you can see my problem. There’s a point where you have to draw the line between wild enthusiasm and passion, and I wasn’t sure where that line was.
The most obvious answer, since I’m a writer, is writing. Right? Sure. But I’d already done a podcast about it, and while I loved that and it was fun, there was a lot about the subject matter we covered that I wasn’t particularly passionate about. For instance, while I’m so grateful to my publishers and thrilled that because of publishing my books have gotten into the hands of people who never would have found me otherwise, I… kinda hate publishing. Don’t get me wrong – I love the people in publishing, I have had the untold glorious luck of working with the best agent and editors this business will ever see, but the monster of publishing itself is Godzilla, and the authors are kind of Tokyo. Getting stomped under the tremendous stinky clawed foot of publishing tends to make you less than enthusiastic about the process. And the thing is, most people looking for writing advice are justifiably interested in those things, and they belonged in the podcast, but if I wasn’t getting sauced with my best friend as I was talking about it, I think I would have sooner stuck a fork in my eye. The other things we covered in the podcast were much closer to what I loved – the crafty goodness, the writing improvs. Those shows would go by in the blink of an eye, I’d be having so much fun. But still, by the time we ended the podcast, I felt like I’d already told everyone everything I knew that could be genuinely educational and useful. I’d emptied the tank on that angle, the “I’m a writer and here’s what I’ve got to say” thing.
Still, there’s something in writing that continues to keep me coming back to the well. It’s taken me a while to figure it out, to understand why I can only talk about grammar and rules and structure for so long, but I could talk about characters and their journies forever. I wasn’t passionate about writing so much as what the writing gave me access to: Story.
Story is fascinating, and I don’t really have any answers about it. I mean, I can tell you what I understand of it, but mostly what I understand just dances around the reality, the magic, that is actual story. There are rules and structure and craft involved in writing, but none of that is story. Those things make it easier for your reader to get to your story, and as such they’re very important, but they’re not story itself. Story is the magical gooey center at the heart of it all, it’s inside of all of us, and something about the words or songs or pictures that me and people like me dream up manages to access it. Tolkien, Austen, Shakespeare all had story going for them, as do Whedon, Tarantino, and Willie Nelson. (Red Headed Stranger was story, baby, and no one can convince me any different.) Story speaks to us in a million ways, not just through writing, but through life. You have stories, so do I. Our stories all have a beginning, a middle, and an end, they all mean something, and they’re all magic.
And that’s what I want to talk about.
I’m really not surprised we share a passion. Story is one of those wonderful things that if you love it in one form you probably love it in many. It’s why I love The Moth podcast so much. It’s live storytelling. I’m in hogheaven every episode.
Anyway, I’ll be here reading posts.