Sometimes it's all about the voices in my head.

Recently I decided I needed to step my writing up a notch, so I gave myself a new challenge.

Blog every day.  Let me just say this, it has been the hardest challenge I have ever given myself and I only realized today why that was.

I told myself to look at blogging as if it were me writing in my diary.  No pressure right?  Except how would you feel if you were writing something that you knew prying eyes were going to read?  Especially when you were trying to woo those prying eyes to come and visit.  

When I wrote in my diary, I wasn't thinking about how something would sound, or how someone else might misconstrue what I was trying to say.  I just wrote for myself and I didn't put any more into it besides where the wind blew me at that particular moment.

 

Recently I made a comment in another blog, How blogging has helped me with my writing, that I write for me first.  In my defense when I wrote that I truly believed I did.  And to some extent I still believe that is true, but now I am more convinced that I always have it in the back of my mind that someone may read this and not agree so I am more political, while not necessarily correct, when I blog.

It was a true writing epiphany for me today.  But here is my problem.  When I write fiction, or when I am working on a story from my head I don't think about what anyone else will think.  I am not listening to me in my head, but the characters who are speaking quite loudly, because they are insisting they need to be heard.

So after spending quite some time today pondering this I have come to the conclusion that while writing is very personal, I am not telling my story.  I speak for the people who have taken up a temporary residence inside my imagination.  When I blog, I am opening up as me.  I didn't realize when I embraced blogging I was really embracing more stress as well. 

So who do you write for?  You or the voices in your head.