I've been thinking a bit this evening about what the point of my having a blog is. I think of blogs as somewhat like self-published personal columns in newspapers--you can write whatever you want, you are constrained only by your own imagination, blada blada blah. The trouble is, I've had the uniquely horrifying experience of having a newspaper column, and I hated it. I thought it would be fun--a platform from which I could rant. But I was 17 and I didn't like being edited and I really didn't like taking responsibility for what I wrote.
Well, looking back, that was pretty damn immature of me, and I'm sad to admit that I haven't changed all that much in the past seven years.
When I first started blogging, I didn't have any readers. Nobody knew it was here (at least I don't think they did), and I wasn't really advertising. At that point, my blog was a glorified online journal--it was just me rambling about my life, with no hopes of sparking discussion or soliciting advice or entertaining or anything.
The trouble is that now I *do* have an audience--both people I know online and people I know IRL read this thing--and I'm still writing like it's just for me. My tag line up there about dedicated narcissism and daily ramblings isn't self-deprecating--it's absolutely true. I don't give much if any thought to whether or not what I write will be interesting to an audience (and certainly not whether or not it will be interesting to the specific audience I have). In fact, I don't even give much thought to whether or not I'm being offensive. I'm still writing like this is my locked diary, even though I am aware that people actually read this--some of them even read it regularly.
So in thinking about this I realized that I want to change my focus here a little bit. I'm still going to write about my life and stuff that is going on with me, my reflections on stuff, etc., but I need to try to re-learn (or, more honestly, learn for the first time) that there is a difference between writing for an audience and writing just because that's what I do. What I'm doing here has all too often been the latter, and I'd like it to be the former. I *want* people to read this--I like having an audience. So I need to write for one.
At least those are my thoughts ATM. If you read my blog regularly and have any thoughts about my trying to turn over a bit of a new leaf, please leave a comment. In the meantime, I think I am going to try to generate some thoughts on a topic of more global interest than my personal life (OK, so it will probably just be a movie review or something, but bear with me), as well as reacquaint myself with spell-check.