Replying, not writing

Hello. I thought I’d make sure it didn’t drift to a month since last writing. School summer holidays can do that to you, you know.

Because I have been writing – but other stuff. The ecourse turned out to be brilliant – lots of food for thought, and some writing tasks within that.

There’s been a whole heap of Officially Required writing too, though that is coming to an end. Supervising the odd holiday postcard. Getting underway with some writing for work.

What’s shifted is that I’ve finally started putting comments on other people’s blogs. For ages, I did the whole thing of reading, nodding, reading bits aloud to Dan at times, bookmarking some pages…but not actually letting the writer know.

How to begin? Some of the blogs I read get upwards of 50 comments a post – one can get double or even triple that.

I feel a bit shy in large numbers of commenters. When bloggers write well, it is a conversation that they are having with you, face to face, as it were. Then feeling like you have to shout to be heard in the comments doesn’t seem right.

I’ve come up with my own rationale for comments: where the post moves me. Where I am genuinely excited for the writer. Where I really love the way they’ve put something. Where there is a connection: they love something that I happen to love too.

It does mean that I am overcoming my shyness, and actually building a little dialogue with some of the bloggers I follow. It may be mostly one-sided, for now, but that’s OK. I’ve not exactly been writing much for anyone to have a dialogue about.

Except, it turns out, I got a face to face dialogue with a family member who has been reading the blog. And liked it. And decided to tell me so. Which was a real encouragement, I have to say.

I am still feeling my way on the writing. I keep telling people it’s what I need to do. Then I get anxious about the gap in writing and go off and write something elsewhere. Usually something Useful, Practical and so on.

I don’t mean to say that the blog is therefore to be silly, or kick up your heels impractical, or…anything that sounds like the opposite of Useful and Practical.

Don’t get me wrong, Useful and Practical is fine, and necessary, and I do a lot of it in different ways. But not everything has to be functional, shall we say.

How to balance a sense of ‘have to’ without it seeming like a ‘should‘? The main trick, as ever with writing, is once more to begin. (Cutting stuff out in everyday life, so there is more time to write,  is an additional tactic I’m working on.)

After all, someone else may be reading, and not replying. But I hope that, some day, they might write back.

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