(Please note, this post has been superseded.)
I have two, possibly contradictory goals for this blog.
- Publish every day
- Publish material that has at least a little more shape to it than hour-by-hour diary entries
Why?
As I alluded to earlier, my goal is to find a way to do what I think of as “processing my life in writing.” I want a structure and framework—a writing life—consisting of keeping an amazing diary (privately, because of course a truly amazing diary cannot possibly be made public until I die) and finding material in that that can be shared, can be made into something at least slightly further along the continuum from private diary to essay using personal experiences to illustrate the universal and all of the rest of that memoir workshop jazz.
Call it an art project, call it an obsession. It doesn’t fit any of what A Writer is supposed to do, but it’s the kind of writing that appeals now. Gosh darn it, I’m going to try doing what I want to do for maybe a couple of years and see what comes of it.
Anyway, all of this is to say I haven’t been satisfied with my output over the last week or so, so I’m going to reset and try a new approach. The basic plan:
- Keep diary notes each evening
- Try to shape something out of each day’s diary notes the next morning
- Put aside the “shaped” item for one week, then revisit, edit, and publish
Before I start that pattern—to do it well—however, I need to build up a backlog of pieces that have been processed per the above. And before I start doing exactly the above, I want to run a week of background/introductory pieces so you have some background on me, this town, and other aspects of the context of all of this. If I’m “reporting on the everyday,” I want to start by sketching out the basic circumstances where that everyday unfolds.
All of this is to say, I’m suspending daily posts—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say relieving myself of the obligation to follow the above pattern—effective immediately.
Then, on Monday, March 18, I will start that week-long run of background posts, followed the next week by jumping into the pattern I described above.
That’s not to say I won’t publish anything between now and then, but the pattern I envision for this blog—the Pirsig’s brick/Lamott’s one-inch-picture frame restrictiveness I want to subject myself to—won’t begin unfolding until then.
And perhaps my vision for the precise shape of it will have shifted by then as well. I am anything but constant.