The Young Writer

Once upon a time, a young writer had an idea for a blog. She was just starting to feel out her writing wings, you see, and needed a space to spread them wide and launch ideas into the world, to muse and to form connections with other writers and thinkers and readers too. It was a quirky space, filled with rambling (but occasionally deep) musings and bright and airy fantasy posts, and it served its purpose well, allowing the young writer to carve out her niche, to land upon her voice and style, to discover the unique thread that bound all her writings and stories together.

The echoes of eternity, she called it, forever ringing through stories of heartache and hope, of brokenness and beauty, with eucatastrophe built into their bedrock.

Yet over time, as the young writer began to soar and her endeavors drew her ever farther away from the space she had originally made her home, her postings became less frequent … and somehow, simultaneously, less “her” and more “simply-that-thing-that-an-author-must-do.”

Eventually, the blog suffered the same fate that many an author’s blog does. It was hauled before the marketing tribunal that forms in every author’s mind soon after signing a publishing contract, and under strict scrutiny and after a rapid crossfire of questions delivered with enough force to trample any spark of creativity (“Well, Blog? What brand do you present to the world? Do you convert blog readers into book readers? How do people find you? Are you saying something important? Are you saying something that might scare readers away? Are you anything more than a compilation of the writer’s rambling thoughts?”), it withered, its defense left speechless, and it was declared guilty of insignificance and ineffectiveness and consigned to the worst fate imaginable: nonexistence.

If the story ended there, it would be a sad thing indeed. And indeed, years passed before anything changed. But eventually, the writer, now not nearly so young, remembered that stories of heartache need hope and eucatastrophe built into their bedrock.

So one day, after the real world had turned unexpectedly on end, uprooting the writer and sending her tumbling, she remembered the place that she had carved out once upon a time. A place for musing and connection, for deep thinking and bright dreaming, for taking in the world one word at a time, and she decided that it was time for the blog to WAKE UP.

It is older now—undoubtedly. She is wiser now—hopefully. At the very least, she better understands her limits and her need for a creative space that is not bound to a regular schedule with the deadlines that follow, or forced to squeeze into the shape and pattern of a marketing tool when other means are a far better fit and this effort was always meant to be free. Once again, it will be simply a space to stretch, to reach out, to test and to try, to give wing and fly, to crash—perhaps—and to rise, to write and to remember why.

So the writer dusted off her ancient passwords and half-forgotten logins, set her fingers to her well-worn keyboard, and began to type …