For starters, write a blog as if you're anonymous.

This will be the beginning of a very lasting (I wish) personal writing program. And the first thing I would like to discuss would be, literally, personal writing.

You see, many people take it as a personal thing, and treat writing all too personally. I have a friend from postgrad who keeps a blog for over 10 years with little feedback, and I feel for him, because I've been there multiple times. The initial phase would be like, I want to write something down, or I want to form a habit of writing. And then to write whatever comes to one's mind would be the natural reaction to such whims. And once you put your life, your many-facet, chaotic, random, and therefore unique personal life, out there, there's only one possibility that this blog will come out, namely, it will mean nothing, both for the writer and for the reader. In this case, being unique means having little common understandings with others.

For me, keeping a personal blog would mean the exact opposite of laying out one's personal life on a website. It would mean to de-personalize oneself, to minimize one's self, to focus on just one single aspect of your life that happens to be an interesting thing for people other than yourself to observe. (On this point I will leave to the next post to discuss.)

Now, what does it mean to "form a habit of writing"? I mean the act itself has become some sort of classic self-help move, especially for those whose lives seem to be falling apart, or those who recently got unemployed, or, much worse, those who dream of becoming a bestseller like J. K. Rowling. The thing is, both the bestsellers and the wannabes are in a very different age of writing now. Before modern times, people write for very specific reasons: to write a play is to be played; to write a novel is to entertain; to write a diary is to record oneself privately. 

A blog is supposed to be an awkward thing if you take it to be a new form of diary, because a diary should always be private. A blog that is written as a public diary is like a Kardashian live show: you know they're acting, they know you know they're acting, yet both of you pretends to be buying it. So, yeah, if you do have a Kardashian persona, go ahead, write about it. But if you do not or will not, please, do the readers a favor, write a blog as if you're anonymous.

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