flights

I was an English major in college, so it goes without saying that I wrote quite a lot. Later, I joined with a theatre company in Phoenix, where we produced nothing but original material – the fruit of our own labours. I wrote, I don’t know, maybe a dozen plays during my three years there.

Now, with this blog, I’m writing more, and more regularly, than I have in years.

Periodically over the years, I’ve had to confront the question, “for whom am I writing?” For myself of course, but whom else? What I write only for myself never makes its way out of my journals. The rest of what I write is for sharing somehow, but inevitably I have borrowed bits of other people’s lives here and there, and I’ve had to ask myself what I have a right to share. I change names and details, of course, but more often than not, my audience has included my sources themselves. Still, in narrative fiction or script-writing, a few small steps away from my own real life (and obviously theirs) seemed sufficent to satisfy them.

This is a bit different.

My blog is somewhere between a journal and a narrative. My friends and family read this, and I struggle with the question of how much to reveal, how truthful to be, whom to include.

For one thing, maybe it’s somewhat self-indulgent or narcissistic to lay everything out there. Maybe it’s presumptuous to assume anyone else is interested. At the end of the day, however, this doesn’t really bother me. If my life isn’t interesting, then people won’t read about it anyway.

In any case, I haven’t laid it all out there. I occasionally creep a little closer, but fear stops me. I don’t want to reveal anything about someone else that might make them angry. I don’t want to reveal things about myself that might offend, or shock, or disappoint, or tarnish the image of myself I’ve carefully crafted and honed over the years ;-)

But fearful writing is boring writing, which is why I appreciate people like izzy.