This blogging malarky

This blogging malarky can be a bit hard from time to time (thanks, Donna, for reminding me of this wonderful word, 'malarky').

I've come to blogging relatively recently - about 18 months and 150 posts ago. For me, blogging's manageable if I don't think about it too much and just write, but once I start wondering what I'm doing and why, I'm in danger of becoming immobilised by self-consciousness. My blogging arose principally from sharing my knitting with other knitters who blog. But as time's gone on, I've blogged about the other things that are inextricably part of my life - principally reading, films, theatre, Sydney, travel and occasionally, politics very broadly defined. Sometimes my family, particularly my grand-daughter, are caught up in the blog, but I've always been a bit inhibited in writing about them - or indeed about my friends - by a fear of intruding on their lives too much.

Over time, my blog has come to reflect my own, idiosyncratic set of interests. I imagine my readers are mainly friends who share my knitting interests, so to assume they'll also want to read about the other concerns of my life is possibly stretching their tolerance...or is this how blogging works?

I've been brought to think about this by my January focus on the Sydney Festival. As someone who has never kept a diary for more than a few days and has a notoriously bad memory for the events I've attended, the books I've read and the films I've seen, I've been delighted by the way my blog allows me to keep a record of such things in the sidebar. But my Sydney Festival entries have gone beyond this and have let me capture some of the feelings and associations from attending particular performances. This has been great for me but I'm not sure it's been great for the blog. Balancing what you write for yourself and what you write for others is hard. I've long thought that the key skill in good writing, or indeed good art, and presumably good blogging, is the capacity to edit well. I suspect my January entries have been a bit self-indulgent.

But having gone so far, I will continue. My final Sydney Festival attendance was last night - a very modern (indeed post-modern) re-working by a British playwright, Rupert Goold, of Luigi Pirandello's 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author. The original play tested notions of what's 'true' and what's 'real' by allowing characters to take on a life of their own outside the structure of a play. This modern reworking places these questions of reality and truth within the more recent story-telling form of docu-drama - developing themes around often sensationalised issues such as euthanasia, paedophilia and incest. I was absorbed by the intensity and unpredictability of the performance, but ultimately thought it would have benefitted by the more rigorous editing I admire. There's just too much stuffed into the play.

I'm sad I'll miss Opera in the Park tonight. I'd love to hear Bernstein's Candide again. Perhaps fortunately for my readers, I'm just too tired.