This fall, I celebrated my fifth year as a blogger with great joy (… and surprise) at having achieved this milestone.
From the beginning, I always thought of the blog as my rehearsal space to sharpen my creative writing skills, as I began the transition from full-time career #1 to full-time creative writer. The fact that many of you have joined me in that journey and encouraged me along the way has been incredibly heartwarming and a source of boundless gratitude. Thank you everyone!
I admit that some weeks it was incredibly difficult to find the time or inspiration (or both) to produce some fresh content, as well as to stay on top of my social media presence to get the word out there. But with only a few weeks off here and there, I managed to keep at it and to not give up. For that, I am incredibly proud!
When time has been in short supply, I had to focus my efforts on moving the blog forward, and not looking back. Then weeks turned into months, and months turned into years, and BOOM! Five years went by and I suddenly had a repertoire of almost 300 blog posts. How did that happen?
And that is where the fun began. When time finally permitted, I went back and read some posts from my first year.
In the same way that people enjoy reliving special occasions though old pictures or old home movies, it is kind of fun to have a documented account of what was going through my mind at that time and to be able to relive those moments too.
Right off the bat, I can see how much I have grown as a writer in five years. Even though my writing consistently maintained a degree of familiarity with readers, I was able to fine-tune my writing reflexes to deliver that extra degree of polish that wasn’t quite there in the beginning.
I remember the extreme nervousness I felt when posting the first ones and stressing over how they would be received once out in the real world.
I was reminded of my perpetual struggle with prepositions.
As I read the old posts, I often remembered the ones that developed quickly and the ones that took weeks of nursing and TLC to get just right.
Sometimes I can even remember what I was feeling at the time or where I wrote it.
And there are some posts or observations that I know I wrote, they are my babies after all, but the circumstances surrounding their creation might be a little vague.
What surprised me most (though I don’t think it should) is the extent to which I still recognize myself in every word I wrote, even in the earliest days. As much as I was in search of my writer’s voice for the blog, the reality is that it was always there.
My writing always came from my heart, my mind and my soul, and by maintaining that authenticity, no matter what I wrote, each piece has my writing “fingerprints” all over it. From that perspective, even though my style, my outlook, my topics and my range may have evolved, at its core, it is still me, just a slightly younger version of me as a writer.
Throughout the repertoire, one thing that never changed was my passion and my love of writing. It is through that passion that the blog continued to grow as did my collection of index cards of writing notes, containing threads of story ideas, character traits and potential plot twists that will make their way into fictional works later.
When I look back, I can see that blogging was the ideal solution for me. Committing myself to one blog post per week (sometimes two) was the right goal, at the right time, given the time I could afford for writing. It made me practice my craft consistently and to grow as a writer.
I often felt pressure (self-inflicted, of course) to put more time into the larger scale fictional works that have been simmering in the back of my head. But the reality is that I wouldn’t have been able to give them the full attention and continuity that I would have liked to, given how busy we were at the office, and how tired I might be at the end of the day.
Publishing a high quality 800 word blog each week was all I could afford, and I am OK with that. It was all I really needed to write on topics that were not corporate in nature and to stick with it to get the practice I needed and to build my confidence as a creative writer. It worked!
The added bonus of the blog is having this wonderful collection of published posts that offer an opportunity to review, reminisce and feel incredible joy and pride in my journey as a writer.
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Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André
