What Makes You a Writer?

When you try to maintain a daily blog, it is easy to lose sight of your other writing goals. Blogging takes a up a lot of time, and if you work a more than full-time job during the day, coming home and writing one blog post is hard, let alone trying to write anything else. Or even tending to normal grooming habits. My eyebrows have retreated back to their 1995 state. When I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, I am startled by the large caterpillars crawling over my face, only to remember I forgot to pluck. Five months ago.

There are times where I begin writing the semi-makings of a book or screenplay only to have them abandoned wayside like a Gosselin child. They start piling up in the graveyard of forgotten stories, occasionally seeing a sliver of light when free time and creative spark coincide- which rarely happens these days. Free time means relaxing. Writing can often be anything but. Where some people feel it is therapeutic, I feel that writing is a constant struggle, trying to regularly get better at something, but not really knowing if I am. It's a challenge that my brain can't accept on a daily basis, though will have to learn if I want to go anywhere.

Wading in the static of online life is what happens most of these days. Gobbling up minutes Stumbling, Tweeting, Facebook'in, and GooglePlus'in definitely leaves limited brain space for a writing piece longer than 1000 words. I can't remember the last time I wrote more than two pages of a document. Was it back in college, when I was a screenwriting major? Hell bent on writing the next great screenplay for my generation? Gosh, writing a feature-length screenplay seems so difficult now. Writing a short story even seems painful. What happened to those characters that keep floating in the back of my brain, trying to break free, hoping one day they escape through paper? They seem like ghosts now. Spirits squashed dead by the minutia of technology.

And if only I could promise myself to shut it all down, run away to the beach or wooded spot, sit there, reconnecting with the planet, finding divine inspiration from everything that is natural. But who are we kidding? Constant inundation of information is what keeps us relevant. I am still too young to write about lifetimes before, so I need that information from others. I'm 28 and I only know what I've experienced. What sort of writer would I be if I relied on that? But instead, I get older, trying to figure out how to balance it all, feeling like I'm getting closer to figuring it out, but fearing that one day I'll wake up 20 years older before I ever do.

But my life means something too. I can write about it, and I do. But sometimes I get tired of analyzing it. Dissecting it. Putting a flowery accent to it all. Sometimes I want to put on paper my new found joys of falling in love or the realization that the generations of my family our shifting into a time I never thought would come. Or sometimes I just want to live it and not be wondering if it would make a good blog post or a tweet.  Or sometimes I don't want to verbalize to myself the reality of something that causes pain. But isn't pain what makes a writer?

I've never thought myself as a writer because the only thing I've stuck with is this blog. This could be what is holding me back above all things. This precise statement, proclaiming that I'm not something, is making me write a blog post of excuses. Maybe it's not about time, or energy, or technology, or the dislike of dealing with emotions. Maybe it's the age old fear that one day I will be discovered to be a hack. Someone who can't actually write. Who relies on dictionary.com. Who doesn't proofread nearly enough. A girl that starts her sentences with "I" too much. A girl with a blog and nothing to else to show for.

Society tells us that blogging is not writing, but I'm telling myself now, I don't believe it. If it makes us lose sight of our other writing goals, what could happen if it became the writing goal?