Also, I ran across Gnorb’s post on Quality: When Enough is Enough, and how difficult it is for him to post things that he doesn’t thing is his best quality, among the other things he covers in his post. I feel that way too, especially since blogging has been my only outlet of creative writing. I feel like, if I’m going to push out 600+ words to the world, it better be the best damn thing I’ve written that day, and a lot of times, it doesn’t.

It also doesn’t help that I’ve suddenly become stunted because for the first time, people are reading my blog that I—well, not that I never intended, but that I didn’t expect. These last few months have made me more cautious about how I word things, because it’s become clear in a very big way that you don’t know who’s reading. Not that I regret anything I’ve written about, or the way I’ve worded it, but I’ve become self-conscious and begin to second guess myself.

Which is just silly, because I’ve always owned up to my words. It’s like knowing that these people were reading took the rest of my confidence, when I was already struggling just to post, now it’s I’ve got to write and impress these people.

Sigh.

That’s why personal blogging is so hard for me. It’s not like I can boot up the feed reader and regurgitate whatever Apple news has come down the pipeline. My posts aren’t based on world events or local news or hot topics. It’s always been about what I am finding interesting at the moment, and apparently what I find interesting right now is twiddling my thumbs.

Or…like another blogger I know, she does write snippets of her life and events which could be for one blog post, but write many of them in a single blog post separating them via a line for each separate event. That might work well for your blog because we don’t see previous posts offhand on your site and you blog sporadically.

It’s just ideas to kick around though. Part of being a personal blogger is to find a writing style we’re comfortable with. I went around emulating plenty of personal bloggers that I loved to find that balance. Now I can just blog what comes to mind and not be torn by it.

I’ve been stewing a week, contemplating how to respond. Not because I think you’re wrong, but because I think you’re so right I didn’t know how to contribute more than “yes, exactly.”

I think the hard part in being a personal blogger isn’t in being personal so much as making sure it’s worthwhile. I’ve never been a diary keeper. I’m not much for keeping track of what happens in my life day by day. It seems that lately, though, I don’t write anything at all because the thought that runs through my head is “well, if I didn’t write about that, how can I write about this.”

Also, it’s hard being a personal blogger because there is so much to write about, it becomes hard to sit down and let my mind focus on just one event. I try to keep my blog posts from hopping about like my conversations do—where I interrupt myself multiple times to tell other stories in the middle of telling a story, and so do nothing but confuse whoever is listening to me.

But it’s hard to turn it into something more than that. It’s hard to turn it into a story people can relate to.

I mean, there are always ample things we do in our lives that we can write down. Unless you live under a rock or never just get out there and do things, the choices on what to write about can be pretty limited…but we still have a choice. It’s not that we don’t have anything to blog about. It’s that we don’t know how to blog about it.

So yes, to turn the mundane into a story. To turn simple plots of our life into an interesting piece. There is the challenge. One I’m still learning. One every personal blogger should strive to achieve.