Four years ago, when I closeted myself in a room to sit down and write, I froze. I considered writing to be a solitary craft but looking at a blank screen or talking into thin air was a sterile exercise in futility for me. I could not translate the same creative energy that I experienced telling a story verbally to the keyboard. My intuitive, imaginative side stayed buried and my logical intellect wrote boring drivel.
I was struggling to start writing again, after raising a large family when I discovered blogs, blogging sites and blogging directories. I snapped to attention. Suddenly, I was thinking up a username, a title for a blog, looking at templates and design and layout. All these activities loosened up my creativity while I sat typing.
It was like an invisible barrier slowly melted, allowing my imagination to bubble up in a stream of written words that felt just as exhilarating as my oral tradition. I was excited to start sharing written stories with other people, people who would read them, respond, comment and give me feed back on what I had written. Within weeks, I was no longer an island but part of a community of other writers who had the very same insecurities and problems as I did.
At first I felt like I had just stepped off a spaceship into an alien world, I did not know how to do anything. Reading directions on-line was useless, I couldn’t understand half the words they used, never mind how to follow their directions.
Early on I read that bloggers, are supportive and unselfishly helpful, rejoicing in each others success and offering free guidance . Well, I discovered that this statement is true. So if you are tentatively wondering if you will fit in, fear not. If a computer illiterate, web dummy can learn while having loads of fun, you can too. Trust me.
