Don’t edit this

I got a comment the other day on something I’d written elsewhere that made me think: “Oh, thank God, someone got exactly what I meant to say”. A while before that comments and reactions to something else I’d written made me marvel how what one writes takes on a life of its own: it seemed to be open to interpretation in so many ways, and while I felt vaguely irritated by the fact that no one else seemed to be reading it from my (unspoken) perspective, after a bit I just sat back and enjoyed how other people could take what I had written and make it their own.

I started a blog in the hopes that it would sort out in my head some of what I felt about writing. I wanted to know if I would ever do anything except think vaguely that I’d “do something” about writing, I wanted to find out if what I wrote had any coherent form or direction, and to discover if there was some middle ground between what I wrote for myself and what I wrote to be read by other people.

Blogging is the cheap and easy way to be a writer. Of course I’m a writer: people read what I write every day – what further proof do I need? But am I? Anyone can pick up a paintbrush and daub marks on a canvas, or pick out a couple of notes on an instrument. I’m a teacher – that’s what it says in my job description – but am I a teacher if no one learns what I teach them? (Thankfully they do, and I am). Can I say I’m a writer only when I have an agent, and a whole line of people have rejected and then ideally edited what I write, and I can hold it hard-backed in my hands?

There are writers whose books I read, and I wonder why I bother writing anything (but I can’t stop, that’s why): I so clearly lack their erudition and understanding, and ability to express it. And then again there are books I can’t bring myself to finish, far less believe that someone actually paid the authors money to write them, and other poor fools paid money to read them. So it is on the internet: pearls of shining beauty and steaming piles of crap nestle side by side in the ether. I read blogs that leave me awed, and others that make me cringe – and very often the reactions are the same. We’re all wonderful on the internet. But so are we in print – it’s not as though only the truly gifted writers are successful. Audiences are self-selecting and correspondingly uncritical in any medium. The difference, really, is whether anyone is willing to invest money in us.

I didn’t start the blog to be discovered as a writer. One day, I still try to convince myself, I’ll write something “other” – something that is more than bite-sized chunks of my brain (because any more than that is indigestible). But I suspect that I never will, and that this medium is the ideal one for what it seems I write when left to my own, anonymous and unrestricted devices, gloriously free of the editor’s critical eye.

I don’t know if what I write is what I expected I would. I don’t know, if I came across myself by chance, if I would read me. I have this horrible feeling that I would gaze uncomprehendingly at my own words and find myself wondering what the fuck I was going on about, half the time. Would I be impressed by my own pretty language, and think that if I couldn’t understand it then it must be deep ? (Well, no. I’m too much of a cynic for that). Would the red-penned editor who sits in my head when I read tear at her hair in despair, crying: “Are you trying to say something here? Why don’t you just say it, in that case? And get rid of all the fish references while you’re at it”. (Er, yes. She does it all the time. I ignore her). Would I think I was hopelessly self-indulgent, and dabbling dangerously in the waters of pretension? Would I think, that if I was me, I’d click on Edit This a little more frequently than I clearly do? (Yes, probably, and yes. But I am the Queen of Denial and rarely listen to myself).

I worry that I’m losing the ability to have any objectivity about anything I write, and then wonder what it matters. If I am self-indulgent enough to write what I want to, and then offer it up to others, is it more important to write something that may seem hopelessly vague and insubstantial to everyone but me, if it expresses exactly what was in my head? If I can read it back and know exactly what I meant, and feel relief that I have managed to regurgitate it in some form that makes it easier for me to live with, does it matter that I inflict it on other people? If I write something that may seem bland and dull, but which transports me instantly back to a moment of significance to myself, is it important that my words may be judged by criteria other than my own?

Does it signify that I often read what I’ve written and wonder what exactly is going on with the prose-poem format I seem to increasingly favour? A format, I should add, that I often don’t have a great deal of time for, when not wallowing in it myself. Am I unconsciously trying to make sense of my own somewhat conflicted approach to poetry (seriously, this is my secret dread: that I really want to write poetry, but don’t know how to, because I find it so difficult to judge from anything but an academic point of view), or is it just that what I write is becoming more similar to the way I used to paint?

I suspect it is. I have a feeling that my bottom line is this: you can have all the skill you like, you can bend words and phrases into any number of shapes you want, and you can dress it up as prettily as you please, but the only real value it has is the ability to hit someone, anyone, in the gut. Maybe that’s what I’m striving for – a body-blow in every post.