For many writers, keeping a personal journal or a personal blog is a necessary creative outlet to keep work private. However, simultaneously they are creating content that is relevant to a wide audience and likely highly different than their personal writings. How do they manage these different voices for very different audiences while maintaining their integrity to who they are as creatives? Creativity does not happen in a vacuum, and it's important to be able to cater to a number of different audiences (with the self or future self being a potential audience as well).
I enjoy this topic, I struggle with this quite often. Finding the time to write, sometimes all I end up with is a journal entry and nothing polished or in proper story format. Although I know daily struggles are something people can relate to, I don't want to brand myself as that kind of writer when I want to publish short fiction. I write in very different voices when not in-character with a story. It would be a worthwhile article to the majority of people on this platform to read, and know whether it's beneficial cultivating a personal presence online as a writer on various platforms. – Slaidey6 years ago
Writers, as all humans do, come with their own intentions behind what they write. However, with editors as middle men, is the world shaped for the better as writers are forced to take on the advice of those trying to mold a final product for a reader. Sometimes a piece of writing can be made more interesting by this process, and a writers piece is molded for the better, which personal blogs miss out on having. Are they better off for that? – Elpis19886 years ago
Good topic to explore. I think it comes down to expressing oneself in stream of writing consciousness in a journal versus editing and being grammatically correct in one's published works. I don't censor myself in either realm. If I am writing a memoir most of what I write comes out naturally. However, there are lines that need to be drawn and one needs to consider one's audience and the potential to offend so I might change a name used or eliminate a specific word. I think this is really interesting because my journal and my writing are very closely linked, whereas there are some writers who insist that their characters have "nothing to do with them or their lives" and i think this is a lack of awareness on their part because EVERYTHING one writes comes from that individual's psyche and cumulative experiences. I only heard one author insist that her characters were nothing like her and she did not experience what they experienced and no interviewer really took her seriously but she maintains this position vigilantly. Not all writers explore the depths of their psyche and she is a good writer but not a great one because even though her characters are good it feels like their is something missing. I really don't know how one could be a good writer and not be connected to different parts of one's psyche as they are expressing themselves in a given character. I analyze and process things on a very deep level;some writers do not. I have always preferred the deep thinkers like Tolstoy and Cervantes whose complexity of characters is remarkable. – youngmollflanders6 years ago