vague

When I decided to do a daily blogging challenge again, I made very few rules for myself. Length of post doesn't matter. Inherent social value of post doesn't matter. Chance that post will make me look like the enormous dork I am doesn't matter. Essentially I have three rules:

Do not allow blog to be taken over by posts on social politics, since that way lies anger and sadness.
Do not write unnecessarily revealing posts about people I'm still in touch with.
Do not be vague.

Vague writing is one of the traps I fall into most easily, especially when I feel under pressure to write something NOW because of blogging challenges or NaNoWriMo. I don't have an idea in my head, no story to tell or point to make, so I just start writing anything in the hopes that the story or point will just make itself apparent before I get to the end. I do this even though I have hundreds of pages of evidence that it doesn't work.

I have two entire novels made of nothing but Vague. In 2010 I started writing with the image of a searchlight down a dark street and a woman with a nail through her foot. I wrote 60,000 words, coming up with two main characters I quite liked, an immediate setting I really liked, a world with a lot of gaps in, and a plot that... well, I never managed to identify the plot. There were people in robes having secret meetings, who started out knowing everything then turned out to know nothing, but then maybe they were just pretending to be know-nothing-know-it-alls, but then maybe the leader knew things and nobody else did, but then maybe she didn't actually know things but thought she did. At no point did I work out what this knowledge they did or didn't have was. I couldn't think of what it might be, so I wrote in another layer of vague mystery to give myself more time. The more layers of vagueness I added, the more difficult it was to think of specifics that fit what was already on the page, so I panicked and added another layer of vague. (I did a similar thing the following year and ended up turning what started out as a small-time family drama into two people with one face and one guy with four faces, all for absolutely no discernible reason.)

Vague blog posts are too short to keep building up layers of mystery, so I just come up with an opening sentence that sounds more meaningful than it is, then either ride a metaphor just past its logical conclusion, or write about something I'm feeling in an obtuse enough way that it doesn't really resemble what I'm feeling anymore. I might address these posts to a non-specific "you", thus implying a universal truth or at least something I intended a wider audience to relate to, even though I know that making something more vague doesn't make it more relatable. I know that non-specific posts about how it can be quite painful to care about somebody aren't actually any more interesting or worthwhile than posts about what happened to me today or that guy I saw on the tube, but it's still a struggle to convince myself not to write that.

Part of me is hung up on the idea of being deep, having a blog full of Serious Thoughts that people will read and say "my, what a lot of extremely relevant and universally applicable Serious Thoughts you have". The Serious Deep Thoughts I've stopped myself writing and posting are often a lot more shallow than the posts I've written about absurd landlords, and they're certainly less interesting to read, but try explaining that to the tiny embarrassing voice in my head that wants to be known as a Thinker.

Voice: Don't be so trivial. Write about great loss!
Me: I have no thoughts about great loss. Except "it's bad".
Voice. Make something up.
Me: Um. It's bad... like a vulture? Or a puffin that's taken a drastically wrong turn in life?
Voice: ...puffins?
Me: I panicked and went to puffins.
Voice: Step away from the blog and don't come back until you're feeling less daft.

And then I don't write, because I don't have any thoughts on your life. I don't know what you've been through. All I can think about is that time I went to a free music festival and put a curse on Toploader because they were being rude to the autograph hunters (and because they released THE WORST FUCKING SONG IN THE WORLD EVER I will accept no dissent on this matter) that my schoolfriends to this day believe actually worked, but nobody wants to hear that story.

I think this time, with a lot of conscious effort, I'm avoiding this pretty well. (So far.) But if you do see a bunch of empty words about feelings I may or may not have had relating to an unspecific happening, feel free to give me a kick up the blog.