The title of this post implies that my renewed commitment to writing is a New Year's resolution, but it's not. I'm not a fan of New Year's resolutions, because they seem designed for failure. I'm determined to do this new thing that I've never been able to do, but now I have to, because it's January 1 again. And then by March, the resolution has waned, or been forgotten, and we feel bad about ourselves for a few days, and then go back to life as usual. (Plus, I'm usually too lazy to come up with a resolution to tell people at New Year's Eve parties.)
So this new blog is not a new year's resolution, though I am resolved to keep it up. I started a blog a little more than a year ago when I discovered feminism, and based that blog all around my newfound love. While my passion for feminism has not waned in the least, finding new things to write about got harder and harder. I don't have cable TV, I don't watch the news regularly, and I don't scroll through news websites and blogs during the day. As a result, by the time I heard of a new event that related to feminism, it had been covered over and over by blogs and news sites everywhere. Why should I write about something when Feministing and Jezebel already have, and probably did it better? I began to get discouraged, and keeping up the blog felt like a chore. I also found myself wanting to write about things that didn't relate to feminism, whether they were other news events, or things that happened to me personally, but I felt I couldn't stray from my blog's theme. So I ended up not writing about those things at all.
I work for a publishing company. My goal, which is very tentative since I only graduated from college two years ago (a year and a half, really) and I have very little experience, is to work for a magazine. I want to be an editor. My boss, the founder and publisher of the company I work for, once said to me, jokingly, "Are you sure you want to be a writer?"
No, I thought. Didn't you listen? I want to be a magazine editor. But what I've learned from obsessively reading magazines, as well as blogs, news sites and all the other sources of information our technological world provides, is that there is a very thin line between editor and writer, if one exists at all. Editors of magazines write editor's letters; "contributing editors" write stories and conduct interviews. And many of the magazines that I would love to work for have small staffs, with people most likely dabbling in several different areas (editing, writing, marketing, bookkeeping) in order to get the job done and the work to press. Even at my current job, as "managing editor" (a title that implies far more experience than I have, but there are four of us in the office, so I am technically third-in-command) I proofread, market, stuff envelopes, ship books, answer phones, make spreadsheets and even occasionally (and terribly) deal with finances. And I write.
So when my boss assumed that I wanted to be a writer, he clearly knew more than I did about my chosen professional field. And his comment, though he said it months ago, was stuck in my head all day today. Why haven't I been writing? Why don't I practice? Why don't I work on this?
And so, to keep myself from being restricted by a theme, or a certain topic, or feeling like I have to write about "important" events, I am starting this new blog. And it is simply my writing blog. I will write. That's the whole point. I won't write every day. Maybe I'll get on some sort of schedule; most likely I won't. But I will write because even though I may never make a living from it, even though I have been denying it since I was fifteen and realized I probably couldn't make a living from it, my boss was right. I want to be a writer.
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