Rhythm of the Write

There's a scene in the 1987 Canadian film I've Heard the Mermaids Singing when the heroine, an endearing, organizationally-impaired scatterbrain, goes into a busy diner for lunch. A crazy-looking man sitting next to her at the counter looks over and says, with utter earnestness, "Is the noise in my head bothering you?"

 This brilliant yet simple line stuck with me over the years, eventually morphing into the title of a column I wrote for a weekly paper (long before the advent of the blog). The content of the Noise in My Head was just that — random thoughts, razor-sharp opinions, homespun philosophy, and the occasional anecdotal childhood memory my mother usually read with chagrin, yet clipped and saved in an old shoebox regardless. Little did mom know that her 13-year-old daughter snuck out of the house in an orange-and-white striped tube top hidden under the standard button-up school blouse, and as soon as said adolescent rounded the corner, off came the blouse and out popped... well, you can imagine.

These stories may not have interested everyone, but for some reason, my little column was strangely popular. When I left that local paper, the column left with me. There was no room for the Noise in My Head in my new position as senior editor of a sophisticated regional magazine, and so that voice was silenced.

 In 2009, I revisited the concept of NIMH in the form of a blog, but the passion to create was dulled by a lack of feedback and a dearth of knowledge on how to capture readers. The blog sputtered for about a year and then ran out of fuel completely as a new idea for a blog took root: women and aging. Or rather one peri-menopausal woman (me) approaching 50. I called it mean-o-pause. I garnered a small but faithful following (more than 10, less than 15) with my mean-o-pause blog http://mean-o-pause.blogspot.com. But again, the reinforcement offered by hordes of hungry readers did not come.

 I continued to write entries for my blogs as the mood would strike, but there was little consistency and they rarely made it to the actual blogs. I felt ridiculous and self-indulgent posting intimate thoughts and experiences that few people would seemingly ever see. But I also had a great excuse for my blogging abyss--my work as an editor sapped me of all creative energy. When your 10-hour days (a couple of bathroom breaks and lunch at the desk) are filled with a mind-numbing jumble of vowels and consonants, few of which you originate, you feel somehow justified in plopping down in front of the TV with a bowl of microwave popcorn clutched between your knees. Ah, the dinner of champions.

This hollow existence, however, cannot sustain a born writer. When you love the way words bounce, skip, and slide into a sentence and find the cadence of language more beautiful than a symphony, you are forever a willing hostage of the pen — or in this case, the keyboard.

In order to satisfy the intellectual and emotional wanderlust of the true wordsmith, you have to get your s**t out there for others to read, or suffer the long, slow death of unrealized creativity. I want to reignite the flame and stoke the passion. Most of all, I want to read and be read.

This, in a bigger nutshell than anticipated, is why I am taking a course on blogging.