In the "Sure, why not?" department

First, let me welcome you, whoever you are, to the new incarnation of the blog--sorta. I'm still playing around with ideas here, and still trying to figure out this whole "retirement" gig, but I realized I actually do want to natter periodically about what happens with my writing. So, here's the first official "this is a blog about writing" post.

You may know that a while back I published a little personal essay to the online magazine The Medium. Calling it a "magazine" is probably inaccurate, though I'm not sure what else one would call it. It is an enormous, sprawling enterprise of writings on about a gazillion topics, by authors of all stripes, professional and not. Anyone can publish to it; getting an audience (beyond one's friends and family, of course) is a bit more problematic. So far, my readership is apparently almost exclusively friends, family, and colleagues--which is fine, as I'm not looking for fame, fortune, or anything else from this particular publishing venue.

But I do have a few followers, it seems, and my experience with the blog clearly demonstrates that the way to keep followers is to feed them regularly. So I'm using The Medium to publish stuff I probably wouldn't try to get published in any other venue.

I am also a subscriber, and I get a daily digest, suggesting articles I might find interesting. (I could just get a weekly digest, and used to, but I actually don't mind getting the digest every day, though I'm not entirely sure how the switch from weekly to daily happened.) Most days I don't see anything to read--or only one piece--but other days there are a slew of things I find interesting. And it's potentially one of those rabbit holes down which one can dive on the net and find one is surfacing hours later, wondering why one feels physically stiff and mentally silted up.

There are also specific areas that provide their own more tailored digests (though one selects areas of interest, and those are the focus of the selections on any digest). I get a few of those, too, including one called "Human Parts." And several days ago, "Human Parts" offered a "weekend writing prompt": "Give us a snapshot, a moment, an experience from a life you could’ve had. What are you up to out there in the multiverse? What would Multiverse You think of the life you have right now?"

So I figured, why not? I'd already been looking at some of my old essays, thinking about polishing them up to fling onto The Medium, but this gave me an opportunity to try something new. And I actually have thought about one particular alternative universe, one of many possible other lives I could have had, a life that would have given me some of the things that I deeply regret not having had in this life. So I gave it a whirl.

The first attempt was frankly god-awful. Dull, flat, treacle-covered tripe. But I realized it was also about three times longer than the word limit--a skimpy 200-500 words--so rather than trying to hack it down, I decided to start all over. The end result is ... OK. It's not one I'm deeply proud of, but it works well enough that I went ahead and published it today. Here's the link, if you're curious: https://medium.com/@tonialpayne/a-different-yes-1fb89fa0415f?fbclid=IwAR3F9VZzHgrw48K4BR2cB1gQd6lt62xMVsCZgauLZJXFB_IW5WVn2y2esr0

But here's what I noticed in the process.

1. I wrote much better when I had to write much less. I begin to wonder if this is the problem with the more extensive novel idea I've been chipping away at. Even though I write it one chapter at a time, the chapters are not self-sufficient: I know there will be more story in which to continue whatever thread I start there. In fact, with the novel, I'm realizing that I probably need to write even more than I am, fill in even more details. But with the novel, I keep hitting patches when my own writing nauseates me (treacle-covered tripe soaked in bilge). I don't often have that experience with short stories--and when I do, I can just toss it and do something else. With a chapter in the novel, I may be able to scrap any particular chapter, but the overall story still needs to be told, if I'm going to tell it at all.

2. I'm never finished when I first think I'm finished. Even after going through the little 500 word essay multiple times, every time I went back to it, I found another way to tweak it, teeny adjustments of a word there, a phrase over in this place. If there hadn't been a deadline, I'd have kept tinkering. I can get to the point with any of my writing--academic or creative--when I think, "That's good enough; send it off." But if it were to come back to me, I'd find more to fiddle around with. I've said it to my students, and of course they never believe me: the only thing that should keep a person from continuing to revise is that there's a deadline. It can be a self-imposed deadline, but one can always, always, make one's writing better.

3. When writing personal narratives, there's a very fine line to walk between revealing enough and revealing too much. Where that line exists varies from writer to writer, I know, so there are no rules for it, other than the cliched "gut check": I just have to feel certain that I don't mind if all the world and her sister know what I just revealed. (I know people for whom that would instantly make it impossible to publish personal narratives--at least without presenting them as fiction: their sense of privacy covers more territory and has less permeable barriers than mine.) But I also know, from reading and from my little dabblings in psychology, that what is most personal is most universal. However, that's not to say that we can expect other people to be as fascinated with our belly-button lint as we are: it's not the superficial parts of the experience that speak to others. If I tell just the events in my story of love lost, found, lost again or whatever, well, OK, thank you, but no one is moved much. However, if I tell what I felt, as deeply and with as much truth and honesty as I can, that might speak to someone.

It's the delving into the soul that matters. I'm thinking of Jung's metaphor of how consciousness is the islands sticking up above the level of the sea, but how under the surface of the waves, we are all connected. So to write personal narrative that resonates, one has to go into those depths, where the light is filtered and strange, and even breathing becomes something one has to pay careful attention to.

I'm sure it is no coincidence that I am getting this sudden burst of desire to write just when I'm about to be interrupted by things that will keep me from writing. I will have out-of-town company from this evening until next Tuesday, then a week in which maybe I'll write but which probably will mostly be spent grabbing some social time with friends before I head off to Portugal for two weeks, during which time any writing I do will be just recording my impressions in a special little journal I've only used for Portugal trips. So, unfortunately, this inaugural "This is now a blog about writing" post will also be the last for at least a week, possibly longer. But--nudge, nudge, wink, wink--if you become a follower, you can opt to have email announcements when I post something new....

It's summer--at least in this hemisphere. It's gorgeous--at least on the east coast of the U.S. Get out there and enjoy it.