Cloud Atlas - Writing without a View to the Future

Introvert Mary speaks is what my friend Lonni called my writing after a recent posting. A high compliment, as I sharpen my focus and my pencil, so to speak, on expressing myself through a blog. She knows that I find people who know people I know in an elevator, network my chiropractor and hairdresser, facilitate webinars, give speeches, make campaign calls and other corporal works of extroversion. And, she knows every extrovert outpouring for me is like living in a klieg light, as a big font billboard that requires a sunlit, tiny font monitor to recharge and inform it.

Last night Alex and I saw Cloud Atlas. What a blast to see Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Jim Sturgess, Jim Broadbent and my favorite, Doona Bae working their way through five and more characters. Much of the story hinged on writings… love letters, an incendiary report, a journal, a badly written book, a book turned into a screen play… each affected the next act and another generation. Each author wrote in hopes of a certain audience and an intended impact. None… none realized the true influence. How would the 1800s journal writer long dead know when he wrote, that his journal published, bought by a composer and torn in half to steady a table would motivate a suicide by someone staying in the home with a rickety table? We don’t know what our writing wreaks.

The more I write, the more I need to write. Concepts, phrases, opening lines, sentences and paragraphs float through my brain. I wish someone would invent a shower keyboard to capture thoughts, but the waste of water, and the increase in late work starts could severely limit my livelihood. When I discovered the voice recorder on my Android, my world got a little better. Thank you to the *Dictaphone people who paved the way. Just think, I am benefitting from a process improvement that allowed a boss to speak his correspondence so a secretary could type it at her own typing speed. That last sentence reeks of old school... what is correspondence today? What is a secretary? What is word per minute typing? Here I am looking for easier ways to convey my correspondence... not unlike a thread of influence in Cloud Atlas.

Lonni chastised me today for not putting notices on FaceBook that I posted a new blog. First, she complained, like a dutiful friend, that she now had sixty blog posts to read. Then she confessed she felt like a slug, guilty and angry at herself, that she should be writing. (I agree with her… she is a fabulous, down to the bone, writer. Or, as my mother, whose only swear was “damn” would say, quiturbitchin’. Get to it!) My blog posts aren’t, until this very moment, about telling people to write, but that’s what the last posting about aging, sorting and moving rendered.

Writing like much of art is a solitary act that requires an audience. As a writer, I may have a specific audience in mind… a person or a group. I could layer on top ambition for the writing to have influence, to sway, to cause change, so I seek opportunities for distribution of my writing through publishing, but I don't. Today, I’ll take the chastisement. For my blog, being followed is the highest compliment. I appreciate a “share”. A written comment makes my post a conversation and feeds Extrovert Mary, and  a “like” is something to be liked. Any response recharges Introvert Mary. 



*History of Dictaphone