How I Write

I wake up at 8:00 AM, because that’s when Dana has to get ready for work. I have made a commitment to start around 9:00. I have kept that up the entire time I’ve had my blog, and it’s made a world of difference. Not only do I have the capacity to think overnight while I’m dreaming, I have the ability to remember it long enough to write down.

I don’t intentionally write blog posts. Most of the time, they are letters or journal entries which I’ve adapted for publication. I don’t leave anything out about myself, but I camouflage my friends because I had a blog years ago that was extraordinarily popular with strangers and my friends were on the warpath. For that reason, I try to write about memories so old that the statute of limitations has run out, but even that isn’t truly safe.

I focus a lot on my childhood because it’s where I began learning how to be an adult, and there are few people where I live now that lived near me at the time. It seems relatively safe to spill secrets that would rile up my family while I’m 1800 miles away, because they do not know that this blog is so much bigger than they are now. I’m not writing for myself and my pen pals. I’m writing for the world. I’ll give you an example. Today alone, my web site has had visitors from the United States, Canada, Malaysia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Peru.

I’m not making me laugh, I’m making the world laugh. It took a while to get used to the idea, because I have a tiny ego, and the idea that I could be making people all over the world roll on the floor is simply beyond me.

So I go back to the practice of writing with a name in my mind. Sometimes it’s Dana, sometimes it’s you. I write personal essays that reach out to you individually because I can’t think of you as a global audience yet. My head would explode.

Boom.