Do Blogs Need a Mission Statement?

One of my original ideas when I decided to start blogging again was to use this as a space to challenge myself as a writer. In this spirit, I’ve been researching various creative writing challenges. This process has made me realize why I write nonfiction. J Maybe I’m being narrow-minded or perhaps even a smidge lazy, but I’ve read at least one hundred of these suggested writing activities in the past day or so and have yet to find ONE that has inspired me to write. Most of them seem (to me anyway) to be the New Age Edition of Composition 101.

“What does boredom smell like?”

“Describe a conversation your inner child might have with God.”

“Write a letter to your parents explaining how they damaged you.”

Ummmmm….no.

Okay, that doesn’t really sound like I’m taking the whole “challenge myself” part very seriously, does it? I’ll admit I tend to be a bit of a snob when it comes to my own writing. I may not be skilled technically, but I like my “voice”. To be fair to those creative writers out there, I did find some pretty fun ideas at www.creativewritingprompts.com and you can expect to see some of their suggestions popping up here soon. But generally speaking, I’ve come to have a deeper appreciation for my own genre of “editorial nonfiction”.

I think that CopperPom will be a healthy mixture of creative writing, slightly egocentric pontification, and various daily tidbits as they occur to me- see “Interiors by Alice” for an example. One friend did mention that when he got the link to http://copperpom.blogspot.com, he at first thought it read “copper porn”- which does open up a whole new world of potential subjects to write about. Stay tuned to see my future experiments in the English language. (Which would actually be a pretty snazzy mission statement...)