Taped above my desk in my office is a list of inspirational advice for writers by Daniel Pink. The first advice is to “show up [and] write at least 500 words.” I like the presence of that piece of paper right in front of me, and it’s effectiveness is proven (somewhat) by the amount of 500 word essays I have been writing for the past few months. I have not done it every day, but certainly more consistently than my usual sporadic (once every six months) burst of scribbling.
One difference between the haphazard way I used to write and what I am doing now is that I am now using a WordPress blog to do my daily entries. In the past, I wrote in notebooks and journals. I would buy a new one each time the urge waxed and then abandon it as it waned. As I look now at the bottom shelf of my bookcase I can see the stack of journals with only bits and pieces of writing in each one. I tell myself I will someday copy everything and make one whole piece out of them somehow. It hasn’t happened yet; but the consistency with which I have stuck to it in this blog gives me hope. Maybe once I have built up enough momentum (“building momentum is much harder than maintaining it,” says Pink) I will begin that grand copying process and see if there is any connection between the separate chunks I have produced over the years.
Another matter related to this has to do with what I have been discovering about ePortfolios which I only understood theoretically before: When you assemble disparate pieces of your work and look at them together you see more than the sum of the drafts. You begin to make connections and to see a larger picture almost like pulling back from a map to see a more comprehensive view. This is related to the writing process in which you do the mad-cap writing in the first draft, then come back later and being architecting the pile of words. Only this time, the mad-cap work is done over a longer broken period of time and the architecting is more generative than reductive.
Lastly, I have become aware that even as the blog has helped me consolidate the location of my writing (no more wasting of unused journal pages), it has also surfaced another issue: privacy. By nature, of course, there is no such thing as private writing in the universe, least of all when done electronically and online). Even so, the paper journal represented a kind of privacy I assumed was there (all sitting there on my bookshelf). The blog, to be fair, allows for settings to determine who can and cannot read my work which I have set to “private.” But the temptation to leave it open and see what happens (like deliberately leaving your journal open in a public place) is attractively there.
My conclusion is that the marriage of the “private” blog and the ePortfolio represents a coming together of two powerful impulses of writing: the blog keeps me writing, and the ePortfolio allows me to generate new insight about what I write so as to begin the sharing process (“writing is collaboration,” says Pink). So, I am hopeful. I do not think this will make me a great writer. I do not see myself that way. But I have always known the therapeutic and self-developmental effects of writing which, good as they are, are also difficult to self-administer. The formula I have here might just do the trick. We’ll see.
