Well, well, well. Would you look at that? Somehow, some way, it’s been three years since I started writing this blog. For three years, I’ve published something every week in this space, from long, two-part reflections on growing up Lutheran to short pieces about midwestern cooking, with a healthy sprinkling of paragraph-length apologias mixed in.
Anniversaries seem tailor-made for reflection. That’s what makes the new year such a bittersweet moment. It’s a chance to look back on our lives and see what is and is not working, and to take the opportunity to make resolutions about how things are going to be different this year. And because we’re all human and time is an arbitrary marker imposed by society, these resolutions often fall by the wayside, leaving us to look back once more next year to try and figure out just what went wrong this time.
This anniversary has its own bittersweet flavor, one that I’m still parsing. It seems like the perfect time to ask myself some questions. Where was I when I first decided to start this blog? What did I hope to achieve? More to the point, where am I now, both as a person and as a writer? And what’s my path going forward?
In essence, what does this three-year anniversary actually mean?
Woah. That’s a lot of questions, questions that probe a little more deeply than I might be ready to process. Besides, this is a blog. If you’re going to do some deep soul-searching, there are better venues. Like the one-man play I’ll be producing, Let Me Be Frank! *
* If this is ever close to happening, please stop me.
So for the next several hundred words, I hope you’ll bear with me as I do a little reflecting on the journey so far, with all the grace and humor and witty insight you’ve come to expect from my writing. And I hope in spite of all that, you’ll keep reading anyway.
Where I’ve Been
I started writing my blog long before I put my fingers to the keyboard. My first post was published at the end of March 2020, largely thanks to COVID isolation. But well before then, I had been thinking about starting another blog, one that was more organized and more dedicated than my first attempt back in 2012, when I moved to New York. Instead of random posts written and published whenever I felt inspired*, I would write something every week, no matter how little I had to say.
* Inspiration, as most writers know, is a false prophet. For the most part, those who wait for inspiration to write are looking for an excuse to procrastinate. I should know. I wait for inspiration all the time. But if you want to be a writer, you have know that inspiration is something that you create, often after you’ve written, or in some rare, ideal cases, while the words are flowing from you.
In the months leading up to that first post, I was feeling restless at work. Don’t get me wrong, I liked a lot about my job. The people were great, the facilities were excellent, and I was still glad I got to work in the theatre instead of having a “real” job. But I was feeling stymied by my lack of prospects for advancement. I knew that if I wanted to make more money or find more satisfaction in my job, I would have to go to school for an MFA (a solid no), transition out of scenery and into another area of theatre (like dramaturgy, production management, or some other broadly defined role), or leave the theatre and find a new path.
None of those solutions was easy, and so I dithered. The problem with being mostly—heck, even partly—comfortable in your job is that it can be very difficult to make a change. I went to work and did my job, but always in the back of my mind I told myself, “If I only had more time…If I could just use the time at work to do something like write, I could totally make it.” And so I conceived of the blog as a way to maximize those hours I could spend writing, at least at the beginning.
From the outset, my idea with the blog was to get better at writing. I’ve always had some facility with words, at least according to my teachers, and I was usually able to produce something of…let’s say standard quality. I could do the work, make something clear and relatively enjoyable to read, and I rested on that for far too long.
As I thought more about perhaps taking my career towards writing, I started to ask myself how good a writer I actually was. One of the problems I’ve presented myself throughout my life is how I deal with early success. When someone tells me I did something well, I take the praise to heart. I thrive on that support, and that thirst for validation manifests in a couple ways. On the one hand, I might try my best to recreate the previous work as closely as possible, usually with rapidly diminishing returns. Other the other hand, I might stop trying completely, because I “did” it, and I’m too scared to try again, on the chance that it won’t be as good the second time.
The upshot is that when I do something okay, I rest too comfortably on my laurels. And it’s true: if you’re not moving forwards, you’re moving backwards. My senior year of college, I focused on writing poetry as the capstone to my writing major. The entire first semester was spent trying to find my voice, and Professor Rambo did an excellent job giving us all the tools and the opportunities to explore what that voice might be. The second semester was then spent practicing that voice, discovering the different facets and learning how to keep discovering new ways of using that voice.
As I graduated, I was terrified of losing the voice I had discovered. I knew that if I didn’t write, if I didn’t practice and create and keep trying new things, that I could very well lose the ability to hear that voice, and to translate it into words. But life and school got in the way, and wouldn’t you know it, I was right. Twenty years later, I would have a hell of a time trying to write like that again. I didn’t use it, so I lost it.
My blog was my excuse to practice. By sticking to a regular publishing schedule, I hoped I would be forced to keep writing, to put down word after word in the hopes that at least some of them might work well together. The idea was that, after clearing my throat, I might be able to produce some really good work, and while it might not be an end product, it could be a means to becoming a better writer.
And so, a little over two weeks after getting married, and two weeks after going into COVID lockdown, I started my blog.
Where I Am Now
As one would expect, a lot of things have happened over the course of three years. Honestly, it’s been one of the crazier periods of my life overall. We moved cities again, this time in the midst of a global pandemic. I spent 11 months as a freelance writer for website content, a job I got largely thanks to this blog. My dad passed away in July 2021. I got another job working for a test writing company. And I put that job on hold this past November when my mom had her heart attack.
That’s just the big strokes, of course. There’s been more, so much more, that’s happened betwixt and between, all of it making up that crazy, discombobulated thing we call life. Times good and bad, happy and sad…. I set goals, I let goals slide. I made commitments to myself that I would keep, promises I would break, progress that seemed like to progress to no one else but me, until even I couldn’t see how I was moving forward.
I’ve learned a lot about myself in the course of writing this blog. First and foremost, I learned that a lack of time was most definitely not the thing holding me back from being a writer. For the most part, I’ve had all the time in the world to write over the past three years. Other than this blog, as well as a host of portfolio material thanks to my freelance job, I have done virtually none of the creative work I’d assumed I would do. As it turns out, writing is actually work, and very few people like the act of writing. They like having written.
I also learned that writing is not necessarily practicing writing, at least not if you’re not committed to practice itself. It’s like baseball. When you’re standing in a batting cage, you can swing at every pitch that comes past you without ever getting any better at hitting. Unless you focus on how you’re swinging, on what you’re seeing, on how the ball reacts to your movements, and applying what you’ve learned to your next swing, you might as well just put the bat down.
For me, I want each post to be like taking a swing in a batting cage. I want to learn from each post, to gain a better sense of my voice, to adjust my word choice and structures to better communicate with my readers. I want each post to be better than the last, to land with a little more force, to travel farther with the reader. But I also know that there are weeks when I’m distracted, when I’m just up there swinging. And honestly, that’s okay too. If I can tell the difference, then that’s s a lesson itself.
Have I improved as a writer? It depends on what you mean. I’m quite happy with some posts, the ones that I feel are more evocative. But there are others I would just as quickly delete from my portfolio, that reflect little more than my ability to write a complete sentence. And sometimes a turn of phrase simply falls out of my head and onto the computer screen that I simply adore, and I get that little hit of dopamine that says, “That. I want more of that.”
I think my biggest improvement as a writer is my ability to understand the difference between those two products—specifically in how they’re produced. In higher education, there’s a theory that students entering college need to spend less time learning new things and more learning what they don’t know. You can pile all the facts and skills on a student that you want, but if they don’t understand the scope of human knowledge, at the very least within their chosen discipline, then they can’t effectively become complete learners. They’ll take what you teach them, but they have nowhere to go from there. They’ve been pulled along a path behind their teachers; they were never taught how to find the trail themselves.
Reading other writers is a great way to learn about how to become a better writer. But writing for yourself is essential. Those weeks when I write something I consider substandard are usually the weeks that I’m least engaged, and I know what that feels like. I understand what it feels like when I’m just chumming out words to have enough to shove on the internet. I don’t like it, but I recognize it. Now when I’m writing and I get that feeling, I know what’s happening, and I can try to remedy it. Do I know how? Hell no. But I can at least recognize it.
Where I’m Going
As with any good self-reflection, the final question has to be…what now? I know where I started. I know where I am. But so what? What difference does all of this make? What’s my plan going forward? When I started this blog, my only concern was getting content out week after week. I’ve done that, for the most part, and I don’t intent to stop. But again, I hear Mike’s voice in my head: “What’s the endgame?”
There’s a part of me, a very small part, that wants to care about views and visitors. Some weeks I’ve flirted with triple digits…but those have usually been because of personal hardships, like my dad dying or my mom getting sick. I understand it. Those are momentous occasions, and most of my readers are friends and acquaintances. I also get continued notes about people liking older posts, usually as they browse through looking for keywords like “self-improvement” and “cooking.”
But I know that’s not why I’m writing. I don’t have that kind of mindset. I know that if I wanted to increase my readership, I’d need to focus on one specific area, become a kind of quasi-expert, and write scintillating (okay, at least interesting) prose week in and out on that topic. But…that’s not what I’m here for. And even if I was, I don’t know what I would write about. Theatre? Movies? Jigsaw puzzles? The ennui of being a border Millennial and getting blamed for literally everything? No, I don’t think so.
So then…what’s the endgame? As I see it, my goal is to keep getting in that cage and taking swings, learning with each pitch. Up to this point, I’ve been batting below the Mendoza Line (that’s under .200, in case you were wondering), and I’d like to up my average a bit. In other words, I like what I’m doing; I’d just like to do it better.
That’s not much of an endgame, I know. But when it comes to something like this, I don’t know that there is much of an endgame, and that’s okay. Writing, like hitting, is as much a practice as it is a result. You’re never going to be a perfect writer, and even if you get close, staying there is next to impossible. But you can practice, and you can keep improving. You can keep working on your form and execution, and hope that the resulting work improves because of it. Because that’s what it is—work.
I don’t know what the future holds for me. Mom is now in a nursing rehab situation, and while that’s a positive step, it’s impossible to know how long she’ll be there, or what kind of shape she’ll be in when she’s done. I know I can’t stay in Florida forever. As the summer creeps closer, my desire to leave is starting to stream down my face in rivulets. At this point, my main goal is to get my “normal” back to actual normal.
But that doesn’t mean that everything has to fall by the wayside. I have ideas—oh so many ideas—and it may be time to start actually putting some of them in writing. In fact, I can tell you that it is time to start putting them in writing. With any luck, all the practice, all the work I’ve put into this blog, will help me write them better.
Happy third anniversary, y’all.
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