State of the Block: A History, a Summary of My Writing Style, and a Look to the Future
Introduction
It’s been a little while since a State of the Block and I’m giving myself 15 minutes before I delve back into reading. So I’m going to do a riff on the blog in general and how I write for it.
Body (History)
I usually say that I started the blog to keep my family informed about what I was up to. It made more sense to publish to a site than send out different e-mails every day. That’s not entirely true. Last spring I got deeply into the Community fandom and found that a lot of really great movies/graphics/people were on tumblr. I joined up mostly to follow people. I’m nowhere as talented to try and make the things they do. But then I tried journaling.
Journals were always something I had high hopes about. I wanted to be the person with notebook upon notebook filled. I’d loved notebooks ever since I was a kid. But I never actually filled one all the way up. A blog is less intimidating that way because it can never be filled up. You decide when the pages start and stop. It’s there when you need it and you can leave when you don’t.
So I started it for me. Then, since I was in the summer before school, I realized that I could use it to keep my family updated. Then I realized that it was an easy way to send extended family news about me - just have my mom send a link. Anyone who wanted to know what I was up to could find out.
But it was very family oriented. Meaning even from the start I knew it wouldn’t be the whole truth. If I wanted to curse like a sailor and rant like a 16 year old and put down absolutely everything going through my mind, I should’ve started a private blog. But I couldn’t resist being public. The upside to that is that you’re accountable. In a notebook, you can just toss it away and feel guilt. But if you know people you love are checking in, even occasionally, you want to keep it going. It was the start of making sure I wanted to keep it going.
This will never be the kind of blog my wonderful sister has started. Hers is themed about her wedding but allows her to get personal as well as talk about weddings in general. We’re both pretty good writers and I think she’s finding the joy in writing for others like I am. Her others are everyone - family, friends, and the outside world. My others were only supposed to be family. (I gave Annie the link to the blog, but that was pretty much it. I asked her not to tell anyone else.)
I got to school. Though I didn’t really recognize it until many months later, I was unhappy in the beginning. The blog was a place for me to go that was basically home. I could escape from college and write to the people who already knew me and loved me, who I didn’t have to impress, who I could just be me. I was also writing for a future Laura, who could look back and see the kind of person I was.
I had tried several journals where every day I’d come home and write down everything that had happened, one after the other, putting in the trivial and the funny if I remembered it. But that was exhausting and time consuming. I realized, rereading those entries, that the fun parts were the trivial and the funny. Those are what the posts should focus on. So I tried to write vignettes and essays instead of shorts stories and novels.
Time went on, things got better, but I kept writing. How I could I not? The blog had been so built into my life that I couldn’t take it out. As I write, I find out more about myself. That’s why I keep a document open called “Weird Dreams.” Every time I remember a dream I open it up and start writing everything I can remember. As I write, I start to realize how components of it came to be and what things might mean. Blogging is a kind of conscious dreaming for me. (More on that in a bit.)
This past spring (2011) I found out that people knew about my blog. I was incredibly taken aback, and then I was upset at my naiveté. I knew the blog wasn’t private. I never posted about it or mentioned it on twitter or facebook, but people had walked into my room to see me writing it. I would brush it off that it was just a tumblr I wrote for my parents. But they found me out. I’m not sure who was first, but like dominos, it got spread around.
I used to hate walking into high school (freshman/sophomore year) because I hated how I looked and how I acted and I was so sure that everyone, but especially the popular kids, were laughing at me as soon as I walked past. And then I had this great realization (when I got my shit together) that actually, no one cared. I wasn’t in their group so even if I did look nuts, really, no one cared. That’s why I was so surprised. I honestly didn’t think anyone would care enough to try and find this thing and read it. But people surprise you that way.
There was some fallout and it was never really fixed, but we moved on. In the summer I used it very little, since I was still in the mindset that I wrote it for the people far away from me. It was odd, knowing that people at school knew about it and could check it, but I had returned to the assumption that, “Okay, they know, it was a thing, but now why would anyone care enough to check it? The only people who might care enough are my good friends, and I wouldn’t mind if they did.” So I posted little but I kept it up.
Then fall came and I headed back to school. Considerably happier, I still needed the blog like I did as a freshman, but for very different reasons. It had, like I’ve said, become a part of my life, and taking it away would make me feel less than whole. It remained a place for essays when I wanted, but became even more an archive for the funny stuff we did. (Okay, mostly Mary quotes.)
I’ve written a little about this before, but writing is an incredible help to me. Like with the dreams, I know I can figure things out if I just start writing. It doesn’t have to be about anything at first, but as long as my fingers keep typing I know I’m taking myself down a road where I’ll discover at least a few things.
Body (Writing Style)
My posts often begin with a trigger. Once in a while I’ll decide a day was good or bad or important enough to recap (it’s also how I try to write my intern posts) but those are few and far between. It’s just too much and it’s not that interesting. Posts usually come about when something happens or a thought crosses my mind. I think it might make a good post, and in the luxury of this exercise, that’s all that matters. When you’re writing a wedding blog, like Jane, you need to come up with a subject and find photos and examples and make sure your readers will enjoy it. My most important audience is me. This is an incredibly self centered exercise, I get that, and I find myself okay with it because that’s become its point. Yes, my family knows about it and reads it. Yes, my good friends know about it and well comment on the funny stuff. But ultimately, I’m writing for me.
I get a trigger - mechanical bulls, let’s say. Yesterday we were walking around and we saw one (it was a mechanical football) and I got on it and it was loads of fun. I might tuck that away in my mind after thinking that it might make a pretty good blog post.
At the end of the day, before I go to sleep, I’d find myself opening up tumblr and sitting in front of an empty text post. It’d start with how I was out with friends and we’d crashed Greek Week so I could ride a mechanical bull. They almost always start with that topical trigger and some context for the people who weren’t with me (and for the future Laura who will have forgotten).
Then, as I write, I’ll start to think about the things that this fresh memory connects to. Sometimes it’s other parts of the day, sometimes it’s aspirations, sometimes it’s my past, and most of the time it’s a mix. As I’m writing I might start thinking about where my love for mechanical bulls began: Arizona. I could start describing the time I was young and the controller was really gunning for me but everyone was cheering so I stayed on. I could travel into my love of Arizona. Or maybe I could take it from there and start to write about how one day, I’d like to live out that dream of being a cowgirl. Or maybe I’d start to talk about how that part of me doesn’t come out that much - the active, let’s actually do something Laura instead of the one who just talks and laughs and writes - and how I miss that.
So topical trigger -> connections to past present and future -> broader theme. I almost always try to end with a broader theme, even if I just hint at it. No post is ever just about mechanical bulls. No essay post, anyway. I’ve put up a lot of shorter posts lately and yes, they are stand alones. But when I try an essay, even though I’m doing a bad job because I hardly ever read them over before I publish, I want a theme. I want to circle back or I want to end some place I wasn’t expecting. I want to learn something from it. That’s the fun in the titles. If I can think of a good title, then I know I’ve found that something new about me and I can just wink at it and give readers a hint.
That’s why it’s frustrating when I realize that I’m not the only reader. This can be misinterpreted. People can think I really am just writing about a mechanical bull. Because they’re not inside my head, they couldn’t possibly know all the other connections I’ve made. A simple quote or a catchphrase is so much more, but how could you know that if you’re not me? I relish subtlety, but sometimes I forget that I’m the only that’s paying that much attention. (These bold headers? That’s a little inside joke. Maybe you thought I was serious. It’s that sort of a thing.)
Body (Private)
I should also say that I do try to think very seriously about what should be published and what shouldn’t. I don’t do it all the time, and when there’s something short I’ll throw it up without much consideration. But sometimes posts deviate from the start. They end up in places I never expected. And these essays need to be looked at carefully. I think about a few key people who might read it, and those people are all in my family.
I have a very firm rule that I will never take to the internets to write screeds about family. I don’t care how terrible I think they are. They’re blood, and I’m not going to bash them in something that’s just as permanent as ink. The same goes for my very close friends. That’s not to say that anger or disappointment won’t creep in or be featured in posts. It’s inevitable. It just happens sometimes. But I have seen too many petty facebook statuses and shouting matches thanks to people stepping over the line.
There are also some subjects I simply don’t feel comfortable putting online. I operate under the conflicting mindsets of “no one reads this” and “anyone can and might be and IS reading this.” I want it to be just for me, but I want the accountability that comes from it possibly being for others, but I want to write whatever I want. I still can’t quite explain that. Anyhow, some topics are sticky. They can be broad, but more often they’re very personal. Those are oftentimes some of the most important posts, because those ones come about when I really need to write. Sometimes I’ll realize at the end and sometimes I’ll know from the start, but these get saved as private posts. They’re completely untraceable online. I’ve got a whole separate section for some of them, actually. Sometimes it’s remarkably easy to set them in private, and other times it’s excruciatingly difficult to decide.
Conclusion
The end game for this has always been a book. Not a New York Times best selling novel, but a nice little hardcover that I’ve put together, printed just for me. What I write every day is essentially raw material. If I have the time, I would like to make it a project senior year to start putting something together. I don’t want to make it a narrative - I like the idea of the journal titles and dates and times (even though I usually hate books like that). I want to go through these posts and cull. I want to pick the best ones and edit them so they really are the best. I want the funny jokes we’ve told ourselves and the list of callbacks, and maybe a picture or two.
(I also want to include those private posts I was just writing about. Those tell a lot more about me than most. They’ve got an importance that the others don’t have, because I made a decision to hide them away from the world and now I’m going to bring them out, at least partially.)
At the end of senior year I want to send it in to a self publisher, get the hardcover, and have an autobiography of College Laura. I want to sit down and read it before I have to move on.
Because it’s not finished. Maybe I’ll decide that it’ll be time to take a new direction once I’ve graduated. Maybe I’ll start a new blog, maybe I’ll change the name, maybe I’ll go back to private journaling, and maybe I’ll stop completely (though I doubt it). There’s a possibility that my dear, beloved bigblockofcheese.com will be abandoned. But that doesn’t mean I’m done.
I’d like to keep writing. I’d like to keep setting aside some time to figure me out, because I certainly don’t think I’ll be done with me in two and a half years. Maybe I won’t need this kind of writing forever. But as long as I do, I like to think of it as a series. Every time I feel a shift, I’ll go back, I’ll cull, I’ll edit, and I’ll print. I’ll have it tucked away on a high up bookshelf, there in black and white: the Laura I thought was important enough to write down.
