To be honest, I had barely read a blog before I got ready to start blogging myself. I was perhaps a bit suspicious of the medium. It’s true that ever since I was a child, with my first Hello, Kitty journal, I could not keep a diary without imagining a future reader. In fairness to the vanity of my young self, the diaries I was most familiar with were those that had been published–Anne Frank, for example. In any case, the blog circumvents the necessity of pretending you are writing for reasons of personal growth, even as you become most aware of your desire to grow, personally.

I have admired writers who are willing to grow in public. Michelle Tea is a wonderful example. She is prolific and talented and has written with a work ethic I envy and then gotten her work out to a growing public (via spoken word tours–the infamous Sister Spit–and publication) since she (and I) was quite young. This means that she’s gotten better, and broader, in front of that public.

Yesterday in the car, Angie played a part of a podcast for me in which the speaker made an important distinction between the natural, healthy dissatisfaction a writer or creator feels towards the work he or she has done and contempt for that work. There is slippage between the two, and contempt does no good, since it casts doubt on the worthiness of everything you do or might do. Dissatisfaction, on the other hand, will push you to stretch, to grow. To try something different. (Although the boys were not interested in (their or my) listening to the entire podcast, Angie tells me that it was from Accidental Creative, which seems like a great group.)

I considered publishing my daily writing of this NaNoWriMo novel that I’ve been working on for the past twelve days (not including today, yet) and which I will be writing for at least the next eighteen days. My idea was to post a sort of blog-style rough draft of this fictional story in installments, much as Dickens published Great Expectations and other of his novels. Then I remembered that I am not Dickens. Actually, I just thought that the pressure of writing a novel in thirty days might not withstand the additional pressure that the novel be readable.

Another part of me, though, longed for the tension, excitement and sheer storytelling demand an audience would create. Shahrazad had no time to erase her efforts and throw up her pages in despair. Shakespeare purportedly scribbled lines on some Elizabethan index cards and handed them to his actors. The ur-storyteller caveman had to create some serious questions in his listeners or risk being tossed out of the cave. And not just Plato’s cave.

In general, I have been guilty of revising for too long, if there is such a thing. I have let dissatisfaction slip into contempt. The problem is, of course, that with each new book (or draft), one learns more, one grows as a writer, and so that book inevitably becomes the product of a younger, less experienced (if also less despairing) writer. I think I made the same mistakes with having children–I waited nearly until the deadline had passed, wanting to get it right instead of merely to get it done. But with writing and children, I have learned that there is much to be said for getting it done as a path to getting it right.

Then, too, watching little people grow in public, it becomes clear to me that nothing can eclipse the brilliance of embracing wherever you are in the moment. I think of Charlie clapping his little hands together in self-approval when he shoots a basket or puts away a toy. I think of Leo’s pleasure in learning to say the “O” in E I E I ____. We delight in them when they can hold their heads up and then when they can play peek-a-boo and then when they can feed themselves a bite and then when they can walk and then when they can say an animal sound and then when they can make a joke and then when they can read a book . . . and they learn to delight in themselves, too. At one-and-a-half (or -quarter), no one is looking back and saying, “Hmmm, I didn’t used to be able to walk. What a loser. I should have stayed in until I knew more.”

Whatever its flaws, reality writing has a lot going for it over its fellows in television. I used to worry that people would stop leaving the kinds of informal, intimate written records that our parents and grandparents left–letters and diaries. Blogs are not the same, of course. But this is what I started out to say: I have become a convert. I read blogs now. At the end of the night, for instance, I check in on the progress of the cutest, bravest little guy and his amazing moms at Simon Lev, and I always read Amy Wilensky’s amazing entry at Seven Hundred Fifty Words. I am learning about organization and Serenity for the Self-Employed from Heather Boerner, about How Not to Write from Jamie Grove, and on and on . . . Words have always been my medium, and it is a great pleasure to find this living stream of them at this time when I am most house-bound.

I would love to know: what blogs do you read?

I am part of a loose network of published women writers. Lately, we’ve been discussing whether to discuss politics, and if the answer is no, in general, is this election and this particular historical moment too important–should we make an exception?

In debating this point, the NEA has come up as one specific organization that will be handled very differently under McCain than under Obama. But so, too, has the nearly inevitable extinction of polar bears under global warming been raised as a consideration. Rightly so, if you ask me. I mean, we have to write about something, and if the whole world evaporates, that will dramatic for a while and then deadly boring, with an emphasis on deadly.

I myself have been thinking about politics, and what role they might play in the life of my blog. Can one extol the virtues of casting against type in one’s novels (making the plumber a thin, gay Dartmouth dropout, for example), without explaining that one ought not go out-of-bounds in one’s own life and cast the small-town mayor as Vice President or the anti-choice hunter as a feminist trophy? Can one be clear that in a novel, choices must be real–between two goods or two evils, between a clear A and a clear B, rather than A or not-A–and still find oneself tormented by the fact that what seems from here a choice between good and evil, the exact wrong kind of choice for a novel–is being played out nationally and internationally with great suspense? (More on choices in fiction in a future blog.)

Panic has driven much of the argument for getting together to support Obama, even if some of our fellow published women writers don’t agree with these politics. (For the record, no one has come forward to say that they do not agree, though some have remained quiet and some prefer to do their politicking somewhere different from where they do their writing conversations.)

But I woke up this morning thinking that for the first time since I was thirteen, I feel excited about this election–not just panicked. What happened when I was thirteen? Well, the Democrats nominated a woman to be vice-president. I grew up surrounded by rhetoric about change: self-help change (change yourself, your organizational system, your bad habits, your eating patterns, your karma, your own tires . . .), spare change, and the inevitability of change. For one thing, it was Berkeley. For another, it was the era of the Cold War (the first Cold War?), and we knew that the choice was change or die. (This is another choice that doesn’t quite fit with the equation about choices in novels, above, but which made for a lot of earnest marching and learning of Russian lullabies and the making of several terrifying movies.)

Hence, as a child, I thought change was inevitable, and that a number of specific changes having to do with justice and peace and equality were right there on the horizon of my young life. Twenty-five years later, I am not excited to find that another woman has been nominated for vice-president, but I am hopeful–if you will–that the next president might be someone brilliant and nuanced and concerned about some of the major things that concern me. That seems like a change. And I will be glad if this country breaks out of its bass-ackwardness and elects a man of color. Maybe in eight years, we can then elect his wife. And get over the idea that we have to choose between having a woman OR a person of color as a candidate.

Anyway, I guess this choice thing is actually the crux of the matter. We are all trying to convince each other that one choice is the good one and one is the evil. It’s like sports–how the game plays out and what it means depends on who you are rooting for. In novels, you try to get everyone rooting for the same team, and yet you still want to humanize everyone. (James Baldwin was brilliant at loving all his characters.) Maybe that’s one of the great pleasures of reading: the reader gets to be the sole consciousness. No one else is there saying, But I agree with Miss Havisham. I liked the old Scrooge. Jean Rhys did write from the point of view of the crazy wife in Jane Eyre’s Rochester’s attic, but that was a different novel (Wide Sargasso Sea).

When we read novels we are subtly, pleasurably manipulated; in politics, the manipulation can sometimes be as subtle, but it’s rarely as pleasurable. If politics is a “choose your own adventure” story, as it claims to be, what can we readers do? Campaign, make calls, donate money, call in to radio stations, drive to Nevada, throw fundraisers, forward ghastly little emails . . . I don’t think we can market another story where the “drill, baby, drill” folks win another round. We have to hope for something new.