Its easy to feel like a bit of fraud when I write pieces for this blog. I spend a lot of my precious free time editing, coming up with punchy titles (not this one evidently), sorting photos, managing my profanity word count. Most of it is spent writing, writing, writing.
But I am not a writer.
Apart from this blog, I have never written anything in my life.
As a matter of fact, that is not true. I once wrote a poem for school about a clock, that was published in a childrens book of poems. It was very short and went something like 'Tick tock, goes the clock. Tick tock, goes the clock. Tick tock, until it stops.'. It was actually about death but no one else seemed to get that and it was published along with all the other poems about flowers and space and whatever normal ten year olds think about. I mostly thought about death when I was ten years old, so that explains that then...
I also, whilst we're being honest got A grade's for my English Language and Literature GCSE's. So its not as if I don't know how to write, its just I'm not a writer. I bloody hated English, Lit in particular, I just could never 'get it' like everyone else seemed to. I couldn't understand poems, I couldn't independently translate them into their deeper meaning. I'd frantically scribble the correct answers in the margin so I could memorise them later, all the while wondering what in the name of fuck it was all this about. I got that A grade from remembering the right answers, revising the correct response. Text book, black and white that's how I do things. I never liked the books we were assigned to read either, I took others from the library and swapped the jackets over so I could read The Bell Jar or a Lord of the Rings instead of Of Mice and Men. I saw that ending coming from a mile off. I bloody hated Shakespeare too. It's too much hard work, I don't want to work to be entertained.
So I'm definitely not a writer but I suppose I could state with some conviction that I am now a blogger. Whether I'm a good blogger or not is constantly up for review of course. By me mostly. I go from one week thinking that this blog is awesome and I'm fucking hilarious. To the next week, where I cringe at what I've published and consider jacking it all in. It causes me a lot of stress to be honest, worrying if I've gone too far or haven't actually gone far enough. I write a lot of things that literally put me out there, just asking to be judged. Its terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time.
Most of the really good blogs and I'm not talking about stats here, I'm talking about quality content that you are falling over yourself to read are written by real actual writers. People with journalist and media backgrounds, people with a natural talent. People who plan and co-ordinate and write for a living.
I don't ever plan what I'm going to write. Ever. All my posts pop into my head at three o'clock in the morning or when I'm driving home from work. It starts as some kind of internal dialogue in my head, that I have to quickly jot down the gist of before its forgotten forever. That first paragraph about the death poem was how this post begun. That was in the early hours, I had to send myself a text message with the words 'Writer / blogger / fraud, published poem, death obsession', so I could go back to sleep. A real writer would have probably got up out of bed and produced a masterpiece within the hour.
For me a weird text message reminder will suffice.
I am not a writer.
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