Blog Post: “Two Pages of Terrible” – Writing About Myself

Okay, this is my first time doing this, so please be gentle. I have tried it before, and it has never really worked out. I am of course talking about writing about myself.

To be honest with you, dear reader, I created this page to post many different mediums of writing; short stories, blog posts, and poems etc. Looking at my page right now, it seems that I am only moderately decent at writing poems, because that is what my content appears to mainly consist of. Why is that? Let’s find out together while I struggle with the thing that I am struggling to write about. Fantastic.

Our journey into this haphazard story should probably start at the start, so let’s start there. Sigh. Over a year ago, I attended a creative writing course in university, called Creative Writing. Creative name as well. While doing said course, all the students attending had to write one poem, one fictional story, and one nonfiction piece of writing. During this course, I found out that I really really like writing. Like really. The poem I wrote for the course was apparently really good, at least according to our teacher (I might post the poem here as well). The fictional story ended up being a short horror story, which was also decent. I received full marks for the course, and it is still probably my favorite course that I have ever attended in university.

Now, you might have noticed that I didn’t mention the nonfictional story in the paragraph above at all, and there’s a reason for that. It was complete garbage. For that story, I decided to write about my own life, and my horrible time in middle school. Right away, I noticed a glaring problem in writing about my own experiences. I could not, for the life of me, remember anything about my own life. Rather than booking an appointment for a geriatrician, I just phoned it in and wrote the piece using only vague memories. It was two pages of terrible. And that seems to be the problem generally with writing about my own life. I just can’t remember stuff. Now thinking about stuff that doesn’t even exist, like a clown trying to scare people in a park and then getting abducted and almost dying, (which was the plot of my fictional story for the course) is easy!

But oh boy, that is just the tip of the iceberg of the problems that I face while trying to write a blog. And I know what you are thinking, dear reader: “Oh poor little him, having so much free time that he can leisurely write a blog whenever he wants to even though he doesn’t know what to write about”. OK, first of all; how dare you, straw man that I created in my head just for this argument. And secondly, it’s my blog, so I decide what to write about, damn it. But yes, I understand your counter-argument, Steve (that’s what I named the straw man). I should just write about real stuff and not worry about it being good or bad that much. Maybe someone somewhere will find it somewhat interesting.

Let’s move back to the topic before I argue with myself some more. In my honest opinion, when writing a blog, one needs to have personality to write about yourself and your life. And that’s an immediate no from me. And the problem isn’t my life, because it is not that boring. I just spent almost six months living in a foreign country, and traveling around Europe. Did I write about those experiences? Nope. Do I know why? Can I also answer with a question? I frequently hover near my computer, almost starting to write about something, and then not doing it. It might be that I’m just too damn lazy for this blogging life. I don’t even have an ‘About’ page on this blog, because I don’t know what to write on it about myself!

I am so, so jealous of a friend that I met during my stay in the foreign country I mentioned, because they also have a traveling blog on WordPress, and it’s really good (go check it out)! I also talked (when I say talked, I mean complained) about this same topic to my sister, who has also written a really interesting blog before. Apparently, being good at writing blogs does not run in the family.

To me, there is definitely something nebulous about writing about real-life experiences. And the problem definitely isn’t the lack of ideas. I have a note on my phone where I frequently jot down new writing ideas; fictional and nonfictional, so I don’t forget about them (and yes, I see the irony there). I still feel like it is so much easier to write poems and works of fiction. I can translate my feelings into poetic terms much more painlessly than into a blog post. Furthermore, when I write a poem; other people might see themselves in it and relate to it, without necessarily having to relate to me, the writer. When I’m annoyed, I can’t just write a post called ‘I’m Really Angry Right Now’, and call it a day. However, I can easily write a poem about being annoyed, like this.

And now my dearest reader, since you’ve made it this far; I’d like to ask you a favor. Or rather, the favor is answering the questions I ask. How do you write about your life and yourself? Where do you find the inspiration, and what do you write about? Do you struggle with the same things I do? Please, oh please, write an answer in the comments on this post! Now that I have actually written one blog post, I need all the help and inspiration I can get to write even more!

Yours truly,

J.J.