Writing For Yourself

I watched an interview this weekend with Steve Martin about his latest book, An Object Of Beauty, where he said,

No matter how many people say it - 'Oh, I'm just writing this for myself', 'Oh, I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves. You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music, it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way.

When I heard it I scoffed. After all, I know people who are just writing because they love to do it. It's a hobby, and they will live happy lives even if they never find an agent or publish one word. I thought I was one of them.

Let's face it, we all know the odds are as high as our wobbling stack of to-be-reads that we'll ever get our novel on the shelves - astronomical, in fact. So surely most of us are doing it for the pure joy, right? WRONG.

Writing has always been a way to share feelings and memories; the key word here being share. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction, a short story, a novel or a recipe, even if you only plan on your friends and family reading it, it's still written for someone else.

This blog has become a place to share my dreams, my little accomplishments and my many setbacks with people who are like me and "get" it. For that reason I am eternally grateful to all of my followers and the wonderful writer/bloggers out there that I've been able to connect with. But now I realize the true reason I started this blog was to share all of those things with my kids. No matter how close you are with your children, you can't have full disclosure for a lot of different reasons. And right now, they don't want to hear me blabbering on about my life when they're busy with their own. But I'm betting someday they'll be ready to share.

Do you know anyone who writes purely for themselves? Can you think of any circumstances where you wouldn't want to eventually share your writing with even one person?

Wait, What's A Thesis Statement?

I would normally post tonight, it being Wednesday and all, but I am tied up with shrews. The northern short-tailed shrew to be exact, as my daughter failed to tell me she needed help with her research paper due Friday morning. Did I mention she hasn't started yet?

It's been a while since I had to write a research paper and I'm struggling just a little bit (a lot, actually). So I will be back on Friday with a hopefully wonderful post about my writing journey.  I would like to leave you with a picture of the subject of this research paper:

Oh sure, he's cute now. But I see nightmares about a giant version in my near future.

What's the last thing that yanked you away from your normal blogging or writing schedule?

News and Happenings

Happy Friday! I never thought it would get here. So much great stuff going on around the blogosphere right now, I thought I would pass it along.

The wonderful Marieke is doing a new series of posts on her blog called How To Thursdays. Every two weeks she'll have a great industry professional over to talk about writing, editing, critting and literary theory. Her first interview with Leah Cypress (author of Mistwood, Greenwillow) is up, and there's a bonus giveaway too!

Everyone wants to increase followers and Rachel Harrie is going to help us do just that. She's kicking off a Writers' Platform Building Crusade on her blog. It's a great way to meet other writers.

Have you all congratulated the beautiful and talented Elana Johnson on the fantabulously gorgeous cover for her upcoming novel Possession? Yay Elana!

From the epic, epicness of WriteOnCon.com has sprung a new writer's group called The Voice. A place where some of us who met during that awesome online conference go to critique each other's work, provide support and encouragement, and sometimes just hang out. We are also planning to start live online group meetings which I'm particularly excited about since I haven't been able to find a writer's group in my area. We'd love to have you join us.

There are four writing blogfests upcoming that should each be a lot of fun:

1. Blogfeast 9/23/10
2. Mash-up Blogfest 10/1/10
3. They're People Too Blogfest 10/2/10
4. Bad News Blogfest 10/3/10

Do you have a contest or "fest" coming up that I missed? If so, please leave it in the comments.

Here's hoping your weekend is long and the writing comes easy! Ciao, my lovelies.

Where Have All The Bloggers Gone?

I recently joined a site for writers which includes an extensive blog listing for all its members. I began working my way through the sites, browsing posts, and found a staggering number of them abandoned or completely unreachable.

What happened to these people? It's as if a hole just opened up beneath them; one minute there, the next minute gone. Were they sucked into another dimension, abducted by aliens, off on an adventure (Eat, Pray, Love anyone?), or did life simply smack them in the face?

According to CyberJournalist.net, there are approximately 175,000 blogs created each day. Add that to the nearly 140 million already in existence and you have some idea of the number of  people blogging.   Conversely, a study by Technorati found upwards of 90% of blogs are abandoned (defined as not being updated in the past 120 days).

It's difficult to share parts of your life with strangers, which is what bloggers do on a daily basis (well, some of us not that often because OMG that's hard), but do you feel a responsibility to keep it up after you've connected with people through your blog? After you've shared the good and bad times with your followers, realizing these people regularly check in, don't you owe them something?

Please, will all of you bloggers out there with derelict sites drop someone a line so they know you're OK? Better yet, take the thing down altogether, because as a follower, not knowing is just plain awful.