Audience of One

A fine line

There’s a fine line between spilling your heart out to someone and keeping silent.

That’s not to say that there isn’t an in-between level where you can tell someone something but not the whole story; more that when it comes to telling someone something there can often be a fine line between not telling them anything and telling them everything. Does that make sense?

The issue is complicated when the audience is unknown. In the past I was extremely candid on my blog – I said pretty much everything I was thinking some of the time, and it all came out in a boring, angsty kind of way that served as catharsis to me and a waste of time to everyone else.

When I started this site, I knew it was going to be different. Firstly, it wouldn’t be just a “diary” as such. My last blog started off as one (though not quite to the “this morning I ate three Weetabix and a fried banana” level of detail) and wasn’t particularly interesting to the wider audience. Secondly, it wasn’t going to go completely the route of the pundit blog. It was going to be a mix.

Part of the mix was supposed to be this: as a Christian, I would write about things that challenge me as a Christian.

Of course, I can’t do this completely candidly. And here lies the problem. There appears to be a fine line between saying nothing (and not writing about these kind of things) and saying absolutely everything (obviously not ideal for me).

This is slightly different to what I was saying earlier, in that I could only explain pieces and not the whole thing. I don’t necessarily have to go the whole way. But I find it hard, once I start writing, to stop. I find it hard to know exactly how much I should say before I’ve said too much. I like opening up, and on a medium where you don’t get an immediate response from the readers (unlike telling someone in person) you can be tempted to write a lot of things you could well later regret writing.

This may not make much sense. I’m not sure. What I’m trying to say is that I’m still going to try and write about the challenges I face. I’ve just discovered that it’s going to be harder than I’d imagined.

(For those of you who can’t quite tie what I was saying in generalisations at the beginning with what I’m saying in specifics at the end, well done – you’ve discovered that they’re not completely linked and that the first two paragraphs are actually about something completely different…)

Matthew @ 14:30, March 30, 2005 to Diary | Comments (0)