emily-ish exposure

Life moments...
from the unsuccessful blogger.

Wednesday, November 23

my lost art

It seems blogging is a lost art. And I say so for, well...myself.

Moments before actually deciding to put pen, or keyboard in this case, to thought, I had just re-read a few of my entries over the last 4 years. Hmm, okay, so it's not really 4 years cos I've stopped for a whole year and have gone mia for other considerable pockets of time. And if I begin to sound incoherent, it's really because I've not written in a really long time. I should qualify that by adding the adverb 'creatively', since I still do write, you know, emails. But really, office-related email doesn't quite qualify as creative writing.

But back to my original thought (which I've just remembered by looking at the first sentence of my above paragraph --- topic sentence they call it --- but clearly my topic sentence wasn't supported at all by my subsequent sentences. Ya, I've become somewhat scatterbrained this way.)... Reading my past entries has made me realise that I've lost the art of blogging (I'm unabashedly assuming I had it before). I feel I no longer can express my thoughts with the same precision and clarity, or in as abstract a way, as before. I'm not as eloquent or poetic in my use of words, and I use less complex syntactic structures (which, from a reader's standpoint, really isn't a bad thing). 

My editorial training over the last few years has inclined me to prize concision and clarity highly for the sake of successful communication. I mean, who wants to buy a book they can't understand? Since we write to communicate, and thus be understood, then we should make sure people understand what we're writing, no? And so this is making me wonder.. perhaps I used to write abstractly because I didn't really want to be understood..? *puzzles* I think I had many deep thoughts I was trying to express, which at the same time I didn't want to give away too much of. Yes, I am paradoxically, yours. 

As I think back now, I remember I was always trying to package my thoughts carefully (actually, perfectly, but that's subjective), in a way that only the really discerning could understand if they bothered to read between the lines. Linguistic snobbery..? But, much of the time I was 'sharing' about matters of the heart, i.e. being hurt by so-and-so, struggling to surrender such-and-such desire, feeling so lost and confused, all the bitter-sweet blah-blahs of an emo soul ;). So being the more guarded sort, I felt I needed to helm in my raw emotions by clothing them in, erm, more cautious terms, since the very people who'd read my entries might also be the same people I was struggling with. And I'm now grinning wryly at all my orchestrated attempts to be mysterious...

And coming back again... I may feel like I've lost the art of blogging (well, my idea of art) but that's okay. My perceived lack of eloquence and abstraction (is there such a word) may be compensated by other hopefully-distinctive aspects of my writing which I've yet to discover. ;) That, regardless, it doesn't make me less real. I've changed over the years, mellowed by life (wow, that sounds old), and the landscape of my self-expression has also changed. In what ways... that remains to be seen... But if you should stick around long enough, you may discern the changes if you read hard enough. Not between the lines, perhaps.