I’ve been thinking about thinking, if you’ll pardon my meta.More to the point, I’ve been thinking about what happens to thinking when it becomes writing.Thoughts may or may not be safe if they’re left in your head, but once they’re on paper other people start to get concerned.A diary, of which the weblog is a public variety, is often private.You may write to remember.You may write to stab at mortality.You may do it just for fun.No matter why you do it, if enough people read it, your writing will be misunderstood.Ironically, even in a nation with freedom of speech, and the press, the writing rights of individuals aren’t guaranteed.Take this blog, for example.Over the decade I’ve kept it, a few jobs—two actual and one potential—have instructed me in what I could or could not write.Like Niagara Falls, you’re getting only a portion of what flows in my river of thoughts.
Thoughts can change the world.Considering the news lately that might not be such a bad thing.In any case, the vast majority of writing remains private.Even with Amazon and others making self-publishing simple, it’s not easy to get ideas out there.Getting the attention of a major publisher has odds that are vanishingly small.And the internet’s a big place, getting bigger by the day.In cyberspace nobody can hear you scream, I guess.Even on a smaller scale, my own computer complains that I write too much.“Not enough space for updates,” it says in its dialog box dialect, “too many documents.”Never mind that I purchased it for writing, and a bit of surfing.It wants more of the latter.Other’s words, in other words, commodified.
My writing life began young, but not as young as that of many fictional writers like Jo March or Francie Nolan.Our apartments and eventually small house had no space for one of the kids to hole up and write.When I did start, in my early teens, I breached the dam without anticipating the results.I’d been reading a lot, and writing seemed the right way to join the conversation.I started composing novels before high school, but my first published book (and for many years my only one) was my dissertation.I always believed that writing could be done on the side for any job, but that’s not the case.Well, it is if you keep it in your diary, I suppose.If you open the tap, however, you’d better make sure you have a mighty big glass in hand.
