Poor Richard's Scorecard

Trying to Be the Man Who Is Actually in the Arena

Along with more reading, I had intended for 2010 to bring into my life more writing. Creative writing, that is--fiction, essays, blog posts, not the kind of stuff clients and employers pay me to do. As with reading, it occupies a permanent spot on my to-do list, and, as with reading, I have found it difficult to check it off as often as I'd like.

Does It Ever End?

Last night, at the fiction workshop I'm part of, I confessed to my fellow writers that I've done a poor job lately of putting myself in a good position to do something I love. At the start of each session, we go around the coffee table and check in our progress over the prior two weeks, and I had to admit that I had done barely any creative writing. Every week, it seems, I renew the pledge to carve out an hour a day just to write, and every week there are reasons--some very valid, some less so--to push it off the to-do list until tomorrow.

Some simplification is in order, I think.

The Immense Talent of the Masses

Writing in the current issue of The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan describes the power of blogging and discusses the revolutionary effect it is having on journalism. In one passage he notes the blogosphere's almost obsessive self-correcting tendencies, with bright, diverse minds from all over the country providing new facts and viewpoints for the blogger to consider on the road to truth. He points out that blogging has revealed that insightful writing lives in far more corners than our shrinking newspaper staffs and select punditry would lead you to believe:

A good blog is your own private Wikipedia. Indeed, the most pleasant surprise of blogging has been the number of people working in law or government or academia or rearing kids at home who have real literary talent and real knowledge, and who had no outlet—until now.

This observation is, of course, a bit snobby; it is only after stepping away from editing a D.C.-centric magazine and engaging the masses that Sullivan realizes there is talent and knowledge beyond his small world? No matter; my addendum is that bloggers don't corner the market on this untapped talent. I'm participating in a fiction workshop -- my first -- and by far its most rewarding aspect is the discovery of poignant, terrific writing by everyday people. Our group includes a veterinarian, a nurse, a retiree, a speaking instructor, and more, and all of their submissions have been extraordinarily powerful, evocative pieces, in an impressive range of genres. Publishing being what it is, I have no idea whether any of our work will ever be printed. What I do know is that all of it deserves an audience. | PRS