On Writing

It's funny the categories that one makes in ones head. I write. I have no problem with writing, I'm a liberal studies undergrad (English, History Theatre, Math) so you could say that I've been trained as a writer. And friends who are real writers say they like my writing (a huge compliment that always takes me by surprise). But I don't see myself as a Writer, nor have I ever aspired to that lofty goal. And yet here I am. Writing.

For me writing has been a means to an end (my apologies to the real writers for the cliche). I want to tell a story or an anecdote or express an idea and writing is the most natural way for me - probably because I spent a lot of time alone as a kid (my siblings are older than me and were out of the house while I was young.) I would tell myself these long narratives as a way to cope. This has left me a little weird about spending significant amounts of time by myself, but that's another blog entry.

I see myself now as more of a chronicler that a writer.

While I love to read fiction, I'm rather poor at creating it. I'm much more the write (mis)adventure stories. Also, as a way to keep myself motivated to train my dogs, I write about my dog training and one of my dog's has obliged by having some very challenging behavior problems, so the Training Diary has developed a following (probably from sympathetic souls) - something I never anticipated. I put the Diary online so I could get at it from anywhere, and so if I had a question for a trainer, I could easily point them to the Diary, and yes of course I use it to share silly dog stories with friends. These days, people do come up to me at agility trials commenting about an entry and of course I get email too. It still happily surprises me that people read it and I hope it always surprises me.

But this was about writing wasn't it? I think one thing I'm noticing is that I'm starting to really enjoy it. I'm sitting in the parking lot of Sugarbowl and its windy and chilly outside and what am I doing? Writing this. Ostensibly I'm waiting for it to warm up and be less icy and that's mostly true, but when I got here and noticed the conditions, I was thrilled to pull a notebook out and start scribbling instead. But the slopes are starting to call and hopefully I will stay mostly on my feet/skis today.