In thirty days, this experiment will be complete. In thirty days, my goal of writing something creative every day will be mostly fulfilled. In thirty days, I will be writing a temporary goodbye note to the wide world of blogging. I have thought about the end for a minute or two and I still don’t have an answer to the gnawing question of what happens afterward. It has been a tough debate with myself and unless I set some sort of goal now, I don’t think there will be many public posts.
My initial thought is to continue writing on this site, but instead of every day it will be once a week. Also, I wanted to focus on writing short stories. That was the hope behind the current experiment: to write many short stories. The reason that I wanted to write short stories is that I hoped that habit would turn into more motivation for writing books. Or at the least revising and editing what I have already written. It was a benchmark goal. Something arbitrary that I thought I wanted. Something that would fulfill a dream I had fifteen years ago. But after eleven months, I have written far more poetry than any short fiction.
The amount of poetry was produced for two reasons. The first, and probably the most obvious, is that the majority of the poems I write are not too long in length. I prefer short poems because (one) poems that last for several pages tend to get lost in themselves and don’t serve the intent I am trying to create. I want my poems to be focused around something simple and relatable. A poem is many things. A poem can have a distinct shape and sound or flow like tree bark. What matters in writing is that the reader understands the writer in some sense and can relate it to their life.
Reading is the lyrical dance of the reader and the writer. At the end of the day, there are words on the page that someone has thought and typed. Then someone decides to decipher those words through the agreed-upon language. But nothing about the feeling of those words is agreed. How the reader interprets the text doesn’t have to be the author’s intent. That vulnerability between the unspoken conversation between the reader and the writer is a double-edged sword. A writer could write something and the reader could misinterpret it and still love it. Or there could be five hundred profound pages between two slick hardcovers and no one cares. The hope is that the words find the proper audience.
The second reason that I have written so many poems is for the purpose of connecting to as many readers as possible. I want to reach my audience. I understand and expected not many people to read this on a daily basis. Even less so if I made each post as long as this one. I get that we are living in a read less-and-less every year kind of reality. If I am on some sort of social media, most of the time my aim is not excessively reading. The reading will be done in chunks. And to connect to as many readers as possible, I figured that I should keep these as short and digestible as possible.
I wonder if I will still wonder all these thoughts in thirty days.
In thirty days, I will not have to decide what to write about every day. I will not have to remember all the nature metaphors I have used before to write poems. I will not have stay up too late in order to fulfill my daily task.
In thirty days, I will write in my journal more. I will get more sleep. I will make more time to read and relax. I will continue to write. What will actually happen in thirty days is undecided. It will take time to adjust to the new amount of freedom.
I am ready for it to be over and I don’t know if I am ready for it to be over. But I do know that I am ready for bed.
