You there, sitting in an armchair, or even in bed, with your iPad2, I believe you have a feeling of great intimacy with the mind of the person you are reading. If you didn’t, you would be on some other page of the world wide web, reading some other columnist or blogger. Hopefully you don’t read only those you agree with, but nevertheless, you are meeting the writer on some level, finding your way to his inmost, essential thoughts, what he has in mind at a particular moment, usually quite recently in time.
That writer gets to write what is in his mind freely and with great honesty, exactly because you have the freedom to move to another page if you like. The writer writes, knowing that someone, perhaps you, is meeting him in language you both understand in some fundamental way.
Most blogs have a subject around which they turn. I realized you could have a project blog after seeing the artist Leigh Toldi’s [www.toldileigh.blogspot.com]. She writes about her work. In some respects the blog becomes her work, but really it’s like a “making of” documentary, the story of how her drawings and paintings get made. Knowing a little about the artist’s thoughts helps people to understand it. You know the artist intimately, not in a personal way, but because of what she tells you about her work.
This is a “making of” blog. It is a description of some of what I am thinking about as I work on “The Pastor’s Kids”. When you are writing from the inside of a character, you cannot put all the background information in. The narrative flows around what the character is experiencing. Especially for kids, it may be only later that they realize what was going on. But the background is there, nevertheless.
Perhaps you are not interested in the minute particulars of what I am thinking about at this moment. I am free to write them, but you are free to turn to another page!
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