Why do you blog? That is a very good question. I’m glad you asked, cause it makes me stop and evaluate myself. I like doing that. Now I have to stop and think. Why do I blog? Okay, let’s see.
I think it’s a “multi-task” reason. First off, I started blogging because I just wanted to have a place where I could talk about any subject that popped into my head. At the time I had just started building websites, and I found out than how longwinded I could get. No, that’s not true…. I already knew how longwinded I was. I’ve have pen-pals since the 1980’s, more than 70 of them from all over the world. My average letter to each person was 20 pages long and I wrote on both sides for a total of 40 written pages. I wrote a letter a day, on top of my fiction/book writing. I was a teenager in the 1980’s and I was writing to other teenagers. Sadly, one by one, my pen-pals grew up, got married, had kids, and eventually we all stopped writing to each other. I went from writing to 70 people to writing to 2 people. I started feeling very lonely. I transfred from pen snail mail to email in 1997. By 2004 blogging was becoming the “in thing” so I tried it out as well, and it quickly took the place of my pen-pal writing.
So, I guess you could say, blogging was my way of communicating to people worldwide, when pen-paling went out of fashion. Like when I was pen-palling though, I keep my blogging and my book/fiction writing separate. I do not think of them as the same things. One I do because I’m obsessively compelled to write about the characters that are in my head, I have to get them out on paper, otherwise I’d never be able to do anything else; I have never felt that I had control over my books, but that the characters themselves take over.
The other (blogging) I do, because I am driven by the desire to just talk about whatever topic I may want to talk about. As those who have today, meet me face-to face know, my actual ability to speak is rather limited due to the fact I grew up in a family where speaking was almost forbidden, and topics one could talk about were limited to The Bible or the Book of Mormon and pretty much nothing else. The result was I rebelled against them by writing to people outside the confines of our family: pen-pals and later blogging.
Last year when I got my job at Macy’s I was faced with something I had never anticipated: the telephone. This is not a thing that I had used more than a couple of times in my entire life. The first few times it rang, I did not answer and my boss was quite upset with me. I had not realized that I was supposed to answer, she had not told me that use of a phone was to be part of my job, and when I did answer it, I found it very difficult to use, never having used one before. This causde me to be chided by the other girls who I worked with, girls 10 to 15 years younger than me, girls who asked, how can you have never used a phone before? Girls who found reason to force me to speak as a result. My answer was quite simple, I have never needed to use a phone before, I don’t talk, I write. At work they questioned my working and never taking a break to talk with either costumer or worker. My answer again, was the same. I do not talk, I write, I was there to do my job, not talk, I had no reason to talk and saw it as a waste of time that distracted from my work. My job at Macy’s was my first real face-to-face contact with people outside of family or my family’s church, I had not realized how much people talk. Nor had I realized that getting a job would involve the act of talking or phoning. When I want to talk to some one I write them a letter, that is what I have always done. Now with the online world, people no longer answer my letters, they respond only to tell me their phone number or email adress, neither phone nor email I use, and so instead I write a new post on one of my 12 blogs. For me blogging is a form of communication, that takes the place of talking, talking being a thing which I don’t really like to do, simply because I’m not used to doing it. Blogging is, for me, what I suppose you would call “talking”, which is why I do not consider blogers to be writers..
And there in lay the difference I find between blogging and writing. Writing is something that I do to write books, as I have been doing since 1978. Writing is the creation of stories, while blogging is just me talking to you. That’s why I blog, to “talk“ not to write.
My other reason to blog, is to teach people what I know about writing. Writing takes up 90% of my time. I spend about 8 hours a day asleep, 2 or 3 hours a day taking care of the animals, and the rest of those 13 hours I spend writing, either on paper for my books or online for my blogs. I have been doing this for 27 years now. My life evolves around writing, the result of my writing so much, so often, is that I’m often asked for my advice about writing, thus how my blog turned into a blog devoted to helping other to become writers and why most of the posts on my blog are devoted to teaching others how to write.
That is why I blog.
~~EK
