Writing is My Purpose, but What’s My Purpose in Writing?

What is my purpose in writing?

This question has been heavy on my mind for the past couple days because the things I said I wanted to do over the last year – and have not done – are coming back to me full force. And I can no longer ignore them.

When I first started on my writing journey in 2008, my writing mentor, Jennifer Brown Banks asked me, “What are you going to write.” I looked at her like she grew horns. What did that mean? I just wanted to write. She was trying to get me to understand that even though we can write many things, we  want to become “experts” in a few topics.  She then told me to think of five topics I wanted to write about.

At that time, I think my five topics were relationships, women, black issues, community and profiles. I don’t think much has changed today except my approach to these topics. When I thought of women and black issues, I was coming from the perspective of “we are jacked up and have to get it together.” We still are and we still do. But my approach would be, “Let’s talk about how we can heal individually and collectively” or “Ignorance is NOT bliss and the only way to understand something is to read about it and then discuss it.”

Anyway, since my writing life began, I fell in love with blogging, multimedia and all this social media stuff.  I’m fascinated by the technology and the brains behind the social media more than the work it takes to maintain it.  I digressed.

Even though all of this new stuff has entered my life, I never lost touch with my desire to do community and profiles.  Specifically, I would like to 1) interview people in the community and 2) interview bloggers, business owners and authors through Skype and video record the conversations.

Time and money were always excuses.

Well, I blow off at least 2 hours a day on blogging and Facebook (this post is a perfect example), and it probably the same about of time or less I would use in trying to schedule and conduct the interview. As for money, I am the best investment I can make in myself.  With that said, it’s time to make some moves.

I do wonder, though: Am I not moving forward in my ventures the way I think I should because I’m not doing what I really want to do?  Only God knows.  But I’m about to find out.