multitudes

So I’ve been thinking about this blog – thinking maybe of ending it, thinking again, deciding that instead the answer is reinvention. No more piecemeal observations or ideas – starting now, I will use this space to post weekly entries. This will allow me to pay more attention to what I post, to really think about what I want to say and to say it the best way I can.

The result, I hope, will be more authentic. I feel like I’ve just been going through the motions up to now. Truth be told, it was my husband’s idea that I start a blog, and I thought my original hesitancy was fear; in retrospect, I think I’ve just always had misgivings that daily posts about my life would be artistically meaningful. I’ve grappled from the beginning with how to be personal without being private, how to reveal my life in a way that was more like a great cinema verite film than navel-gazing, Real World-style. I'm after a kind of truth that requires more artistic attention. I think some people could produce that daily - but not me.

If I’m going to ask you to listen, I want to care that you hear what I have to say. And the truth is that too much of what I've posted here to date has been filler - the best I could do in half an hour on a Wednesday morning - which has turned this into a great exercise in writing regularly, but not a mechanism for making art. My hard drive's full of stuff I'm more proud of, stuff I've written over the past few years - and while it's tempting to just use this space to publish all of that, I want to push myself to devote real attention to my writing on a regular basis, and I hope a commitment to weekly postings here will do the trick.

I'm thinking I'll publish on Sundays, so - come back Sunday, May 15, and let's see what I can do.

# posted by Amanda @ 8:24 AM