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Writing for the Drawer
[from my OhLife! journal]
So a quick review of my last OL backup, cut and pasted onto Word:mac, shows a word count of over 228,000 words since my first entry in 2010 August. So assuming that that figure is ballpark-accurate (even allowing for things like formatting tags getting counted as "words" when the formatting is stripped), that means that I've written the equivalent of almost three standard-length novels in the last two years and 5 months - just in the form of journal entries e-mailed to myself.
So, how is it that I'm so prolific here at OL? I guess writing "stream-of-consciousness" feels natural to me; but it's not just a spontaneous, uncensored stream-of-consciousness. If you were to put a keystroke logger on my computer you'd see that I edit these emails constantly as I compose them. I ponder choices of vocabulary, punctuation, and style. Even at my least self-conscious, I'm pretty self-conscious about my writing.
Maybe that last observation explains why all this private writing hasn't carried over to more output on other fronts - my political blog, or my LJ, much less actual creative writing. That's the challenge I'm going to set for myself in the coming year: I know I write reasonably well, now I want to take some of the energy that I've put into "writing for the drawer" and invest it in writing for readers.
So a quick review of my last OL backup, cut and pasted onto Word:mac, shows a word count of over 228,000 words since my first entry in 2010 August. So assuming that that figure is ballpark-accurate (even allowing for things like formatting tags getting counted as "words" when the formatting is stripped), that means that I've written the equivalent of almost three standard-length novels in the last two years and 5 months - just in the form of journal entries e-mailed to myself.
So, how is it that I'm so prolific here at OL? I guess writing "stream-of-consciousness" feels natural to me; but it's not just a spontaneous, uncensored stream-of-consciousness. If you were to put a keystroke logger on my computer you'd see that I edit these emails constantly as I compose them. I ponder choices of vocabulary, punctuation, and style. Even at my least self-conscious, I'm pretty self-conscious about my writing.
Maybe that last observation explains why all this private writing hasn't carried over to more output on other fronts - my political blog, or my LJ, much less actual creative writing. That's the challenge I'm going to set for myself in the coming year: I know I write reasonably well, now I want to take some of the energy that I've put into "writing for the drawer" and invest it in writing for readers.