Why I blog

Tonight, I went to see the movie “Julie & Julia” , a typical chick flick about the joy of cooking, the complexity of human relationships and blogging, yes, blogging.

The movie features Meryl Streep, one of my favorite actresses (I still cry every time I watch “Bridges of Madison County”). In the movie Meryl portrays Julia Child, a cooking legend who single-handedly changed Americans’ view of French cooking. While in the movie Julia (Meryl) is going through the process of writing her acclaimed “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” cookbook the second plot of the movie focuses on Julie (Amy Adams), a temporary government worker who despises her job and who finds herself approaching her 30th birthday with nothing to look forward to until she makes a commitment to cook her way through all 524 of Julia Child’s French cookbook recipes in just 365 days. She records the process on her blog. My quick movie review: Meryl Streep’s acting is absolutely superb, the movie’s dual plots rather predictable, but there is one more interesting thing… the art of blogging that, as far as I know, is making its cinematic debut in this major motion picture.

The struggle of a beginner blogger as Julie goes through the early stages of establishing her blog’s readership and craving reader interaction felt oh so familiar. While Julie’s blogging starts slow it ends up landing her a major book deal. This happy ending made me think about my own blogging experience. Why did I start? I did not do it because I was going through a mid-life crisis or had a splendid goal in mind. My reasoning was much more prosaic. As part of my job I needed to fully understand the medium and what better way to do it than to immerse myself in writing of my own blog.

The setting up of the blog was easy and painless. Heck, my 9-year old went through a similar process when she set up her own blog. Sticking to it and establishing my blogging routine was a different story. I had grand plans of blogging once a week (and for the first couple of months I stuck to it), but soon discovered that in order to make a worthy contribution to the blogosphere I needed to truly researched my blogging topics and that took more time and effort that I had originally anticipated. But I stuck to it and in the process I discovered that while some of my posts are going to be more insightful and thoroughly researched, some of them are going to focus on me and my own blogging journey and hence would not require extensive research, but rather soul searching.

And while blogging is still a struggle for me in terms of finding the time and getting it done while continuing to wonder if anybody out there is even paying attention to my ramblings I stick to it not entirely because of my readers, but because it lets me experience the joy of being a writer. Even if my blog does not land me a book deal or attracts scores of commenters I feel blogging is something I need to do and I might just consider sticking with it for a while.