The other day a  much younger friend said,
“You are sure doing a lot of writing on your vacation. All that blogging seems like a awful lot of work to be doing.”

She went on to ask me questions about why I wanted to start writing as if this “writing” process started on the day I made my first blog post. I went on to explain that I have been writing, reading, and reading books about writing for a very long time (perhaps more than half my life). I didn’t just start writing yesterday.

Whether or not I wanted to admit to it…I was and had been a writer for a very long time. It was only the fear of rejection that I nurtured more than my aspirations that prevented me from sharing what I have written outside of my very small circle of friends who are also aspiring writers. 

It was actually my twin sister who first suggested that I start a blog earlier this year.

“I think you are a better non-fiction writer than a fiction writer,” she blurted one day during a phone conversation about blogging. I started to tune her out as she went on and on about how to market a blog and what topics I should write about. Since I don’t remember giving her access to anything I wrote since she found a story I wrote when we were thirteen after I read my mother’s copy of Native Son.

“Blaine is writing stories about living in a slum!” my sister yelled out as she ran to my mother’s room waving the pages of my journal she had found. “We don’t live in a slum!” Several minutes later my mother came to my hiding place in one of the bathrooms and asked…

“Why are you writing about living with coach roaches and rats? We don’t live like that.”

Both embarrassed and mortified that my privacy had been invaded I didn’t answer. Instead I buried my head in my knees until she left.  At thirteen, it was very difficult for me to articulate I was just trying to write like Richard Wright. I knew that what I wrote wasn’t true. It would be many years later that I would be confronted on that point in a way that I could understand by one of my college writing professors.

“Writing is about truths,” he said to me after reading one of my short stories. “Don’t any of these characters you have written about have any redeeming qualities.” I had given him a story I wrote about my experiences at another college where I first felt the angst of discrimination. He was right of course. I was angry and I wrote looking only through the lens of anger. The world is made up of uncountable shades of “the truth” (depending on where you are standing at the time).

     “Writing is hard work,” I said in answer to her question. “It is also agonizing, it is a revelation, but it is soul cleansing and for me–it is necessary. My journey as a writer has been my longest safari to-date. I am just sharing the journey with everyone now”