Tenth anniversary

The act of writing has held my interest for a long time. It's partly because of its openness: the fact that possibility exists. There may be an idea that you hadn't quite thought through yet, but somehow it can come out in the process of writing. Writing, it seems, is a tool for thinking. Perhaps that's simply because writing is an imagined conversation with another and the presence of that imagined reader confers upon it a dialogic character. That conversation, it seems, is very attractive - almost to the point of addiction. Despite that, I completely forgot the tenth anniversary of this blog (here's my first post), but what surprises me when I look back is that even then I was preoccupied with trying to make sense of writing. A lot has happened in the intervening time, but that fascination certainly hasn't dimmed. Blogging for me now is about condensing my reflections into something that's about the size of an average paragraph and then finding a still or moving image that can sit alongside it. The post may be more or less complete in its own right, or it may simply be work in progress. But always it's what Rosenblatt describes as a transactional process: '....always an event in time, occurring at a particular moment in the writer's biography, in particular circumstances, and under particular external and internal pressures. In short, the writer is always transacting with a personal, social and cultural environment.' (1989:163). And in posting on the blog, at times it forms the basis of something I'll write more about, extend in some way, but more often than not it's just a sketch, complete in itself. The piece of writing that I started the first blog with actually turned into a book chapter entitled 'Barbie meets Bob the Builder at the Workstation', but many subsequent posts have been of the moment, a passing observation or a whimsical thought. Nevertheless they all form an important expression of writing as exploration, as a transactional process.