My Writing is All Over the Place

I marvel, I ruminate, I grieve, I rage, I laugh, I give my opinions good or bad. Maybe it's multiple personalities. I don't know. Maybe it's how I'm supposed to live my life.

Photo by Łukasz Łada on Unsplash

Today I put aside a Constant Commoner piece that was going to be fun and I hoped lovely. Just my everyday observations, with pictures. Easy stuff, to be honest, but, if I managed to do it right, it might generate remembrances and stories and the kind of conversation I dearly love and come away from feeling good and tender—as if all’s right with the world.

But all is not right with the world and I can’t wake up thinking about another mass shooting, this time in Maine, and pretend it is.

Since the last two pieces I’d published over there were somewhat harsh and reality-driven, and not at all like something I might want us to spend time talking about in our gentle parlor, I thought I needed to write a sweeter piece—one that could bring us together as friends and ease us away from the dread of the outside world.

I like doing that, as much for me as for my readers. We need those respites in order to get on with our day, and we need to be able to find them readily.

I do, at least. So I try to accommodate. Even when my heart is heavy and dark and my thoughts are somewhere else. I write those gentle pieces as much for myself as I do for others who might happen upon them and find something to take away with them. They’re as necessary to me as the pieces I write about the world and all its dangers.

I can’t pretend they aren’t all a part of me, yet I have to believe those more successful writers when they say I need to focus, to land on a platform and stay there if I’m ever going to draw readers enough to make this all worthwhile. The niche is the thing.

The line goes: Readers need to know what they’re in for when they come to our pages. They’re most comfortable when we stick to the conversations we’ve always stuck with, and, while emotions can play a part, they have to be consistent.

Our constant readers can’t be smacked upside the head with new and different and sometimes jarring observations. They won’t stay long if it happens too often. They need to feel as if everything we write comes from some wise and thoughtful analysis of what they, our readers, want. They need to feel they come first.

Well, no.

I can go along with that to a point, but I didn’t build these spaces just for readers. I built them for me, too, because I have something to say—a lot of somethings—and this seemed like a good place to say them.

So today I set that pleasant piece aside and I pulled out an angry, defiant piece I’d written days after Sandy Hook. I prefaced it with some necessary information, then I published the entire piece as it was written on that day when I had to keep wiping away tears as I wrote it.

I hate that I have to do this, and I wouldn’t have to do this if, after the horror of Sandy Hook, the leaders of this country had seen that singular event as reason mighty enough to demand enormous changes to the way we handle guns. They didn’t. And until they do, I can’t see these paltry efforts of mine as anything but an obligation, cemented by the grief and anguish tearing at us all every time we wake up to yet another massacre.

My writing is all over the place. Life is all over the place. I sometimes envy those writers who can stick to their consistency guns when it comes to topics and style, no matter what else is going on. But that’s not me. It’ll never be me.

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