Writing Exercise 28: Personal and Public

Writing Exercise 28: Write about your writing exeperience.

Writing can be both a very personal and a public experience.  In the last 28 days, I have written 28 times whether it be stories, poems, or essays.  Within each one, I have poured a little piece of myself into it.  My thoughts and feelings are recorded into the computer as well as my arrogance and mistakes.  This personal experience is then made public when I upload it to this blog. 

Knowing my writing will end up on a blog keeps me accountable to writing every day, but it also can influence my writing.  Sometimes, I will start typing a journal entry only to change most of it in the editing phase for public consumption.  The content remains the same while I will add more details and explanations so that the public may enjoy the piece without having to know me personally.  Other times, I start clicking away on the keyboard with the audience in mind, and I edit my thoughts as I go. 

And like my writing, my audience can be both public and personal.  My public audience is the actual people who read my blog and may even sometimes respond with an email, comment or a Facebook post.  Blogger records how many people read my various posts and tallies them neatly on a statistical page which includes a graph.  According to this chart, I have an average of 10 readers per post, or per day.  Although Blogger keeps these viewers anonymous, I do know a few of the people who read my blog as I also update my Facebook status with my posts.  There, some of my FB friends will read my blog and then post a comment in FB.  However, that doesn’t account for all of those who read my blog, so some still remain as strangers.

My personal audience, you may think would be my FB friends or my actual friends and family who read my blog.  However, you would be mistaken.  When I refer to my personal audience, I am referring to the imaginary, mostly faceless, people in my head that could be reading my blog.  I think they are the same voices that make comments when I look in the mirror in the morning that tell me I am not good enough.  You might have a similar audience in your head.  These are the voices that are the most critical.  They say things like, “You aren’t fit enough, nice enough, smart enough, strong enough, whatever enough.”  And it has a very limited vocabulary which includes words like won’t, can’t, no, and such.

So when I write, I tend to focus my attention to my personal stories and opinions, but I try to bypass my personal audience in my head and focus on the public audience that is slowly growing.  If I were to spend too much time with the personal audience in my head, then I would probably never have started writing for every day, for 30 days.  The critical voice would have stopped me long ago.  I am grateful for learning to bypass that audience so that I can post this for you. 

Oh, and thank you for reading this as my public.

And if you want to post a comment, please do so below or send me an email.