Finding My Words

My pen feels like an old friend, one that I haven't met in years. I pick it up and put it to paper, the grip so familiar, the words choked and tumbling from the nib, spilling out, clumsy on the page. My desk is once again my window to distant worlds, to people and events I have never seen before. A girl is crying on the other end today, she is in her brother's room - what is she thinking? Her thoughts are no match for my window, I put them down to paper.

Sentient sounds from below, some snippets of a pop song my sisters must be listening to, and the window disappears, abruptly. I am back at my messy desk, the light from the table lamp pooling onto my page, and the girl crying is a distant dream. I look around: there's a mountain of newspaper cuttings on the floor, a judogi reeking of sweat from last night's training, and my books have made their godforsaken pilgrimage onto my bed, hidden beneath the pile of clothes I've yet to fold.

I have started writing again. My window is grimy, the images sometimes distorted after long neglect. A very unproductive post-SPM phase is now over.

Tomorrow I will have some glass cleaner. And that world will be clearer. Why is that girl crying? I will soon find out.

On Blogging

When I was 15 I remember reading a Star Education feature called World Wide Writing, published 30th May 2004. That was a long time ago, and I was a very different person: I hadn't yet joined Judo, I thought the PMR was the worst thing to have happened to me, and I thought Avril Lavigne sang art of a very high order.

This article featured what Star Education thought was the best of Malaysian student blogs. Here I pause in writing this post - I ran upstairs, opened my inspiration folder, and started entering the links of the blogs from that article. Most of them no longer exist: Daisy Boo (baabaablackcitysheep.blogspot.com), C'est la vie (gonzalos.blogspot.com) and William Fong (williamfong.theuseless.com) are all 404 page not available. The only blogger from that article whom I still read is Edrei Zahari, and with 1000++ posts in his archive he's still going strong.

A few months later, on November 17th, I started this blog.

It was a nicer time to begin blogging. Blogging wasn't mainstream yet, so nobody was there to tell us what to do and what not to do. None of that "OMG the whole world can read what you're writing about my school" garbage had started, and only Dooce had been fired for blogging about work. Heck, it was a grand time for all of us. It was like the 70s all over again (make love not war, at least not blog ones), corporations wondered what the heck blogging was for (now we get corporate blogs ... so go figure) and we made up the rules as we went along.

Today we have spite wars and people blog for the strangest of reasons. They actually do it for money, can you believe it?! Ohmigosh - money!!! Others blog for readers. Back then we neither had money nor readers, and if you told people you had a blog you'd have probably gotten a stare for all your efforts.

"Block hia? Ohhh ... that one I know I know. I use got Vitamin D wan, can prevent skin cancer! You lerr??"

So here I am, scratching my head and wondering why I'm still doing this most arcane of Internet activities. It's been a great journey, sure, and I'm certain the million or so teenagers out there ranting and venting their feelings would say the same (oh, you mean it's 2 million now?! It was a million the last time I checked ... like, oh, 5 minutes ago ...).

Why Do We Blog?

Which, come to think of it, is one very important question. I've given my reason quite a few times before: I blog because I want to keep a record of my growth. When I'm old I would want to sit down and go through my archives, and laugh at my thoughts; laugh at my antics. It's a picture that keeps me going: in my mind's eye I have kids, and my wife will be chucking a frying pan in my direction over a sexist remark I made back when I was - what? - 16?

Ahh, good times lie ahead.

I am convinced that people blog for many reasons, and some reasons are more fulfilling than others. If you want to blog for popularity ... fuggedaboutit. You may very well get popular, but that's by far a long shot, especially if you've got the writing skills of a rock. More often than not you'll get disillusioned and stop blogging, and then - this is bad - let your writing pollute the already polluted blogosphere. And if you get popular - cool. But I've seen too many cases where bloggers have their blog define their self-worth, and their egos inflate over something as unsubstantial as reader numbers.

Others blog for money. Now, I've got no problem with that, but I can't stand blogs who blatantly splatter ads all over their layouts without giving you quality of any sort. I'm happy if you give me writing that'll move me, and I'm happy if you give celebrity gossip or well picked fashion photos or just brilliantly composed photographs. But God please save your readers if you're blogging for Pay Per Post, or if you've just put up a Beowulf review with 6 pictures and less than 100 words.

Please God in heaven help me.

The thing about blogging is this: it's a very unfulfilling, boring hobby if you don't do it for the right reasons. Do it for the people you'll meet, rather than the fame you'll get ... do it for the feedback and the support you'll receive, rather than the money. Some do it for therapy - they spill their guts out on the digital page - and that's perfectly fine. Only often it's so unreadable only people who really care about them read it ... and even then sometimes not. But so what? You're writing for therapeutic reasons, and nobody has to read it to make that kind of writing effective!

Different people have different ways of blogging. I've friends who let their pictures do their talking for them, and I've friends who rant a lot, eventually letting 1000 words or so make their point. And I read them because they're my friends. Nothing to it.

But it's reaching beyond our circle that's tricky. It often calls for us to really improve the way we write. It means being honest, being clear, and - occasionally - being funny. And this is the good stuff - it means we're churning out real quality ... and that can only mean a better blogosphere.

There is a phrase in Stephen King's On Writing that applies to blogging as much as it does to writing:

Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around.

If I ever (God forbid) let my blog take over my life, it would do me well to remind myself: it's just a blog. On the Internet. That's probably read by less that 0.1% of the world's population. Blog well, blog good, and for all our sakes do it for the right reasons.

Our eyeballs will thank you for it.

Also related: Mark Bernstein's seminal 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.

Update: I removed a sentence from the 14th paragraph, reading: 'In doing so, however, you're lowering the quality of writing out there. There's nothing much we can do about that.' It doesn't make sense, and even if true, doesn't contribute anything to the point I'm trying to make.