How has blogging affected my writing, and were do I get my inspiration? These are the questions I ask myself often, and overall, I’ve actually found them fairly hard to answer, but after a few tries I came up with a few surprisingly simple answers. Over the past quarter, I’ve seen my voice come out more in my writing, some small frustrations with a lack of improvement, and that my inspiration comes from my everyday life.
Since I’ve found working backwards helps me write sometimes, I’ll start from the end. My inspiration for so many writings has come from many unexpected places. When I first started writing these blog posts, I would struggle, reaching for the nearest subject I thought might work. But as I relaxed more and got used to the blog system, I began to pull topics more easily from my everyday life. I pulled things from class discussions, like my post on evolution. I also commented on upcoming holidays, seen in my halloween/bioshock post. I even wrote about recent discoveries like the mass grave found by a railroad. I am amazed at the variety of topics I’ve managed to come up with and honestly, can’t help but wonder how. But I won’t argue with my brain when it actually works right. So if the meaning of all that isn’t clear I’ll restate it: my inspiration is life itself. See here, a quote from a post about my uncles new book:
“Hey guys, remember a while back when I mentioned my Uncle Alan's first book was hitting the shelves? Well, last night, the cover for book two, A Cure For Chaos was unveiled at a book signing in Billings, Montana. I am very proud to claim the artist who did the cover as my father”
I took one look at this in the context of trying to find my inspiration, and said “woah. this makes sense, life is my inspiration” Because really truly I seem to find the best topics in everyday life. But let me ask you a question, what is there really to talk about other than yourself? You found that article and wrote about it. You commented on the biology discussion. You speak of your experiences, your conversations, etc. It’s an interesting theory, because no matter how hard you try to not talk about yourself, you always must.
Well of course, everyone hopes to see an improvement in their writing, and looking back upon my past blog posts, I can’t help but hope with all my heart and soul that I’ve gotten better at writing. Because every time I look back I want to delete everything up there and replace it with something better. And, as you probably guessed, this is a vicious cycle. If I were to delete it all and write new stuff, end of next quarter I’ll want to do it all over again. I call it the artist’s curse. Be it art, be it writing, or even speaking, you will always hate your work when you’re done with it. Now, most people are not blessed with this curse, for it really is a mixed blessing. It allows you to look at your work objectively, notice the flaws, notice what you did right (you will usually find more of the flaws) but it can easily head into the realm of the hypercritical. It also often leads people to dislike you, because rather than patting you on the head and saying “that’s nice dear” people with this curse will tell you the ugly truth, that you will always need improvement. To illustrate my point, I will throw you a bone and provide you with two quotes, one from a post that needs a lot of work, and the other from a post I actually find acceptable:
“Well, well, well... this is yet another piece of evidence that Q is overall unimpressed with the world around him. He tells us that before the dinosaurs went extinct, he felt that they needed to be destroyed, not only needed to be destroyed, but they wanted to be destroyed.” (from my analysis of the Calvino Stories)
“This book is truly great, a twisting imaginative plot, great characters, and depth to the settings. The book starts with an eighth grader named Jenni on the bus, on her way to a routine science class excursion” (from a Book Review on A Measure of Disorder)
With the first one, I see many flaws in only two sentences:
- constant repetition of the word “destroyed”
- poor sentence starter of “well, well, well”
- poor grammar
- to generalized explanation
With the second, I see fewer flaws, but would still probably edit the second sentence, as “on her way to a routine science class excursion” would make more sense said like this: “The book starts with an eighth grader named Jenni on the bus, out of school for the day for a scientific excursion”
So overall, I am unhappy with my apparent small amount of improvement and I feel that with all the practice I’ve been getting I should be better than I am.
One thing I can definitely say I’m happy with though is my voice. I feel that over the past quarter my blog has allowed my inner voice to show, better reflecting my personality and who I am. With practice on the less structured writing styles, my formal writing has improved noticeably. But we aren’t talking about formal writing at them moment, we’re talking about my informal voice. My quote actually comes from a book review, believe it or not.
“Everything is just dandy, until everyone falls asleep near the lake as a fog rolls in. They wake up hours later, the fog gone, and aren’t on Earth anymore. They meet up with some interesting creature along the way, not all of them friendly, and everyone in the group changes into something from this new world, something more suited to their souls, their personalities. Everyone, except Jenni.”
Now, before you laugh, yes, I really do talk like this in person. I feel that this is a great example of how I really speak is shown better in my writing. Actually, this is one of the few things I like about my writing, how it sounds like me. It’s amazing, when I was in middle school, my teacher warned me that you should be more formal in all your writing, and be careful not to ask too many questions, or address your audience too directly. But I’ve found as I’ve gotten older that the reverse is true. People tend to love a bit more of a free style, they love challenging questions, and of course, they like to feel that they are the ones this is targeted at. So pretty much, voice is a good thing, and I’m proud that I’ve blended a bit more of mine into my writing.
Now that I’m done looking back and shuddering at my own awful writing (I’m joking... I think). I’d love to look forward and think about what I can do to appease the almighty Artist’s Curse. I hope to branch off into even more subjects, hopefully ones that my audience will find a bit more interesting (do I actually even have an audience?) and ones that I myself find more interesting. I also want to better improve my vocabulary and find new words to use (redunant much?). Speaking of redundancy, I need to work on that as well, I seem to repeat myself and ramble quite a bit. Well there you go, my analysis into one small part of myself.
No comments:
Post a Comment