Through The Lens of Life

I have changed the subtitle of my blog.  Although it is technically the first update to it, there has been far more to it.

Originally, I had no subtitle.  It was simply Cheff Salad.  I didn't want anything more than that because I wanted my posts to matter most and not be categorized.

But the fact of the matter is that this blog does have a purpose.  From its very inception, it has been about writing.  Every post is about writing in some way, so I wanted to add a subtitle that would explain that much.  However, I had found that so much of what applies to writing applies elsewhere.  So although I wanted to say, "A blog about writing", I decided to make it, "A blog about writing, and sometimes about life."

And really, that has been the subtitle until just now.  But I have wanted to change it much earlier.  Not long ago, I went through a phase where I felt like I was spending more time talking about the world and people and all my random thoughts than I was talking about writing.  It felt like I would tack on writing as a justification to having made a nonwriting post (mostly because that's what I was doing).  I truly wanted to change it to "A blog about life, and sometimes about writing."  I never did, though.  Part of it was that I didn't want to betray the heart and purpose of the blog by making writing be secondary.

So I went for months continuing on, feeling like I was not being honest, but not wanting to advertise the truth.  And today I realized a new truth.  I am writing about writing, and I wish to continue to write about writing, but the vast majority of it will come from experiences in the real world.  Really, that's what writing is mostly about, the real world.  Even writing about a magical land is going to reflect ways that we see the real world (or how we wish we could see it).

All of the advice I can ever hope to give will be seen through the lens of life.  Abstract knowledge and concepts are useless and unhelpful.  Even my recent grammar lesson used actual examples from real speech to show what I meant.  And sometimes the lessons I have are harder to place my hands on.  They are more so a way of seeing the world, which may only indirectly affect how and what you write about.  But even still, they are lessons of a sort, getting you to think and ponder, and hopefully write something on the subject (even when not directly told to).

Life is my lens to see writing clearer, much as writing is my lens for life.