On writing

"Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it."

---David Sedaris, interview in Louisville Courier-Journal, June 5, 2005

American writer

I get these "daily quotes" on my gmail homepage every day. I love this one from today. I think it describes bloggers in particular. I think it describes ME in particular. Blogs give wanna-be-writers a platform to say what we think and feel about something, and it makes absolute sense to us when we say it. So much so that it's incredulous, disappointing, even sometimes hurtful when we realize that a reader has taken what we said and filtered it through their own views and experience and suddenly what seems like brilliance to us turns out to be something we wish we hadn't written at all.

I don't know if that's what David Sedaris meant by his quote. I don't even know who David Sedaris is. But it spoke to me. Writers aren't different from other people in the sense that they have the same experiences, the same thoughts, the same relationships that all people have. What makes writers different is that we dare to share them and even have the audacity to try to teach somebody something, or make them laugh, or make them think, by sharing these experiences, thoughts and feelings.

But words can be dangerous. It doesn't always work out the way we mean it to. Sometimes that makes me think I shouldn't write at all. Then I sleep it off and try again the next day ...