The problem I have with blogging…

I have heard that there are two kinds of everything, zeros and ones, so to speak, those who do and those don’t.  I know lots (or perhaps I once did) who wrote with the hopes that some day that they would become the next Stephen King or J. K. Rowling. Me, I like to write simply for the craft itself, I kind of purging of ideas that stroll around my head, giving life to imaginary ghosts, characters desiring life (or sometimes death). 

To this end, I am constantly creating worlds, places, for people to inhabit.  I have in the last couple of years been looking at various different role playing games, designing “campaigns”, story lines, characters, and scenes.  I know no other role players where I live.  I have wanted to perhaps find four or five people to play out of the campaigns but have not made the time or effort to do so.  The genius of the role playing "campaign” is that it requires very broad planning.  If your plans have too much detail, you are heading toward disaster for the first moment when the player characters do something unexpected, all the beautifully drawn out details go into the garbage can.  Simply put, you have limited control.

The development of campaigns allows me to be lazy, I can create the concept without being responsible for drawing the details out.  I don’t have to describe what is happening, the player characters will do that when they play the game.  The story unfolds through them.

I love writing, even more than developing role playing campaigns.  It taps into the part of my mind where I am making connections.  It allows me to develop a world where things make sense, where things happen for a reason.  The problem with writing, though, is that it requires detail and nuance.  You cannot be a lazy writer.  A lazy writer’s world has huge black-hole gaps in it or the characters and scenes are disjointed.  They are not full.

I can recall many a time when I have written when I struggled with the words, things just aren’t developing they way they should.  It is the frustration of trying to jam an orange through a drinking straw; the whole story becomes unraveled and useless.  I cannot tell you how many times I have abandoned a thought an idea as result of the unraveling of the story. 

I suppose it is just a matter of discipline.  I need discipline.  However, with today’s modern conveniences, it is just too easy to turn on the television or the Sony Playstation for cheap and hollow amusement instead of developing something with substance which leaves you fulfilled.

I think most artists and writers feel that their work is never quite done, merely abandoned.  But, no one likes abandoning their child.  I know I don’t.  And so I have many children, i.e., stories and novels, which I have written that I return to, nurturing from time to time by editing them or adding another chapter or two to, but never quite releasing as to live in final adulthood certainty.  The effect is that often my stories and novels are buried in a graveyard of words before they have even lived.

This is my problem with blogging.  It is a finality which I am not prepared for and as a result, I do not like the concept of blogging.  I have started this blog last year and left it out to hang.  (I can’t help but feeling guilty for taking the title “written-scraps” from some blogger who actually might have turned it something more useful or beautiful.)  A blog requires commitment, a significant other that you have to come home to.  And if you are not in love with that other, coming home to it can be miserable. 

That being said, I am ready to settle down with this blog, “written-scraps”.  I have decided that I am will begin blogging.  I have committed to myself that the children my blog and I procreate will not die and be buried in a graveyard of obscurity.  My blog will be a scrapbook of their development, a photo album fro m childhood to adulthood.