For Me

My pretty audacious goal of writing every day in November was inspired by a colleague who involves her students in the National Novel Writing Project every November. This woman gets 8th graders to commit to an insane word count over the course of the month and guess what, THEY DO IT. My own two girls both wrote impressive stories their eighth grade years (although Emma got too involved in the beginning and middle of hers and had to rush the end so she just had all of her characters die in order to end it, which is really frowned upon in the writing world) and they still talk about it. For someone (me) who deems EVERY YEAR “The Year of Writing” and then has hardly written anything over the past two, committing to a blog post a day for a month is as crazy as having 8th graders produce massive novels in a month. But.... here I am, and over at CMS, there they are.

Writing is weird because in today’s world it’s deeply personal and also very public if you so choose. In the pre-Internet world, writing was never seen until it was published as a book or magazine. Today it can be “published” the second after you compose it as an Instagram caption or Facebook post, a tweet, or a blog post.

I knew when I set out to write every day in November that I would publish all of the blogs, no matter how pitiful and uninspired, but I would only share the posts on fb that really mattered a lot to me. I wasn’t sure at that time how much I was tied to the feedback of others on my writing, and I’ve realized I very much am. On a blog, you can see how many “hits” your post has gotten. I don’t have an established readership outside of people I know (because let me tell you, they would be very tired of waiting for posts if I did 😂), so the ones I don’t link to fb get zero to little hits right away. It’s been an exercise in remembering my purpose these past nine days as I have seen the low numbers on “seen” blog posts, and a good exercise for me, I believe. I have been reminded that this month is for ME to prove to ME that I can discipline myself in my writing, that I don’t have to only write when the Muse hits, and that sometimes inspired writing happens only when I put fingers to keyboard and not always in my mind before. I need this month. I’m doing November for me and for the hopeful future I have.

The ability to see interactions made me think some about my recent discovery of Instagram stories and how you can see who all watched them. I never think or care to check but every time a kid gets my phone to show me how to archive them 🤷🏻‍♀️, she looks at my numbers. Kids today can tell you when they lose a follower on social media and I can’t even tell you how many followers I have nor how many people I follow. I have noticed that I pay attention to the “likes” and comments on my posts, but I can also tell you I never notice it on anyone else’s.

This morning, this Wired article  showed up in my twitter feed and I wondered to myself how it’s going to rock the world of some teenagers. It’s an interesting premise, the idea that hiding engagement (and it looks like users will still be able to see it, maybe, just not the public, like blog posts? or maybe not) will increase the authenticity of posts and make Instagram, as I read one place on twitter, “a nicer place”.

I guess the future will tell how that goes, but I’ll just be over here the rest of the month (I hope), faithfully putting fingers to keyboard. For me.

(And waiting to post this blog till a high traffic time. 😜)