writing to write

This is my third blog post that I am posting here which makes it my second most active blog over the course of a decade of making blogs from pathetic Livejournals with copy-pasted themes to WordPress blogs that started with a post promising to actually write this time, I swear. I had one other blog that surpassed this – one wherein I commented on aspects of what’s now generally known as ‘geek’ culture but specifically on video games and comic books. I had this blog back in university when I was a regular reader of similar female-focused geek culture blogs like The Mary Sue and had posted about ten or so times before coming to an abrupt stop.

At the time, I had started the blog as a way of getting experience for possibly veering into a professional writing career where I wrote similar things but was paid for it. I tagged my posts carefully and made sure to post at times where I was sure people would be reading blogs and not busy on commutes, at work, or sleeping. I believe that my peak readership for that blog was fifteen people for one post.

The peak readership of this blog is five people, I think, but I don’t know well enough to confirm. I don’t tag anything and I don’t care to even edit the things that I’m writing. In effect, this is more like a journal than a blog, where my relatively uncensored thoughts come to rest.

When I had been writing on that last blog, I had not yet published any of my art writing and had not even shown any of it to anyone else besides individuals in a creative writing class that I was taking for credit. I was unconfident in my writing, among other things. Since then, I have published a number of pieces, including one in the Malahat Review which I am particularly proud of, and I have no qualms about sending my work for edits or discussing it with others. For those pieces and this very blog post, I don’t find any trepidation in sharing even the most personal of my work. I believe that the act of publishing or posting or however exactly you seek to phrase what I am doing has shifted away from being about others responding to my writing.

Simply put, I believe that for me now more than ever, the act of writing is much more important than being read. I think that this may have been because of a subconscious effort in humility. I don’t expect anything that I write to change the world or even change someone’s mind. It’s not that I’m unconfident in it but just that I don’t particularly care to think of myself any greater than I am. I think that in considering writing in this way, the act of it is more centered on myself than anyone else.

But that being said, I do like when people enjoy my writing. This is my favourite comment shared on something that I’ve written:

So, I suppose that if something that I write touches you, I’d like to know – not for my own ego or for my writing process, but because while shouting into an endless void suits me just fine, I like hearing someone shout back every now and then.