I haven’t been keeping up with this blog very faithfully, and sometimes I feel a little guilty about that and sometimes I don’t care. It’s mostly for me, anyway, with only a somewhat large handful of readers.
Part of the trouble, though, has been trying to figure out what I could write about that might be interesting to readers. As a writer myself, what I want to read about from other writers isn’t what someone who just reads might want to know. What I want isn’t a good measure of what people want to read. What I wind up blogging about is mostly writing. I know for a lot of readers, that’s kind of boring.
I was listening to a radio interview the other day with a woman who has a popular article in some magazine — don’t ask me who, I really didn’t pay attention. What struck me was when the interviewer asked her why she wrote about such eclectic topics. She said, she wouldn’t know what else to write about, and people seemed to like what she was doing. It was mostly inspired by whatever she’d seen or read about over the course of her week that got her thinking.
I suddenly flashed to my favorite comedian, Eddie Izzard, who once said in an interview that his shows are about whatever random junk he thinks about, which is sort of everything.
I love that.
I think about and wonder about and research the most random junk in the world. And I think being curious about everything around you is the hallmark of a good writer. One of the things that drives me crazy is when I read a book and the writer has clearly not done her research about a topic I know about. There shouldn’t be a huge multitude of facts, like the author wants to prove that they know something about whatever information their characters have to dig up, but the information presented should be factual. When a writer adds something that just isn’t factual to their work, I want to scream, or at least write them a strongly-worded email. There’s creative license, and then there’s just sloppy homework.
So. In the spirit of being curious about everything around me, and doing some weird research, I will begin blogging about anything and everything that crosses my mind. I know that’ll make this blog more interesting to me. I hope it makes it more interesting to you, too.
