Writing

So, I'll all caught up in the Rachel Hollis last 90 days thing that all consultants of a certain MLM skincare company are crazed about (is everyone else friends with at least 20 of these consultants on FB, or is it just me?).  Anyway, we have been going through a lot of changes in our house, which I will put in another post (Scattered Excerpts, remember? No linear posting here) and I've also been trying to be more deliberate in focusing on goals overall recently because I am ONTHEBRINK of 40 and mid-life crisis, I think.  Anyway, back to writing.


I love writing.  I have loved reading and writing since I was a kid. I belonged to a writing group in high school, where we wrote fiction and met before school to critique each other's stories. I don't think I'm very good at fiction, but still love to write.  After college, I haven't written much; the entries on this blog are pretty much the extent of my writing.


So, a goal I have had is to write more.  I'd love to be published someday (but AHHH, running out of time, I'm so old!! mid-life crisis!) but that is SO FAR outside m comfort zone, so I'm exploring what a goal of writing more/trying to get published looks like, which led me to my question -


Why write? 


I think Hollis touches on this in Girl Wash Your Face - she states that she writes for her, and no one else.  But, do you really write for yourself, and no one else, if you are putting it on the internet?  Why not write in a word doc on your laptop?


My niece has a form of dyslexia, and my sister-in-law shared an article about the science of reading that I found fascinating; so much so that I followed up with listening to the radio program the article arose from, and listened to that as well - with two newly minted kindergarteners, how reading was taught wasn't something I had thought, and hearing how it can  be taught so wrong was concerning.*  One of the takeaways I got from the article was how NEW written language is - it's only be around for a short period of time, relatively speaking, compared to spoken language. It was designed as a way to communicate with others.


Which brings me back to our desire to litter the interwebs with blog posts.  Writing is not just writing in a vacuum, it is a form of communication. The innate purpose of writing is to communicate something to others.  It goes against our very purpose of developing written language to write for ourselves only.  So, like others, I will send my writings out into the internet, and continue to write for myself, but also because I need to communicate in written form.


Next time - more about goals and how I live in fear.  No really.


*After this article, I panicked that our elementary school may be ignoring phonics and phenomes and frantically reviewed the curriculum.  They aren't.  Whew.  Being a parent is hard.