Journaling, Blogging, and other Writing

Okay, my earlier post about Mermaids was not my final post for NaBloPoMo! I was thinking earlier about writing in various forms.

Journaling, for one. The other night our writing group was discussing journaling and keeping journals. It came to light that much of what was journaled by various members came when they were down or going through a difficult period in their lives. They didn't tend to write as much or as consistently when things were good. I joked that perhaps that was why I've never been good at keeping a journal--I'm too happy. (This does not count the reams of terrible poetry I wrote during high school. I think the stuff I wrote during university had improved somewhat, or at least some of it had. But I digress...)

Back to the journaling, it was only a joke, but it does make a kind of sense, especially when you think of Tolstoy's quote,

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Meaning, I think, that there is a lot more emotional territory to mine for a writer in an unhappy family. Ergo, there's a lot more emotional territory to mine in a journal when times are unhappy.

Blogging, however (while I'm not especially consistent with that, either) seems to broaden the scope of journaling simply because it's a public venue. When we journal, we generally do not have the expectation that it will be widely read. When we blog, we know that many people *may* read it. Thus there's more impetus to make it interesting, to share thoughts we think others might appreciate or understand. The occasional rant or complaint still pops up because we have made this place our personal airing-space, but I think the best blogs offer more than those things. That's why I do better with blogging than I ever did with journaling. Because it's not just about me.

As for writing fiction, I think my feet were really set on that path by my junior high school English teacher, Mr. Patrick Reilly. He made me think that maybe I had something--not necessarily a talent, but an affinity, perhaps?--for storytelling and working with words. And although there have been detours along the way, I'm still on that path many long years later. So he might have had something there. I've just done a quick scan and I see that, not counting works in progress, I've written well over 600,000 words of fiction, poetry and non-fiction since I started writing seriously. I guess perhaps I do have an affinity for words. I sure do seem to like writing them down, at any rate.