You can thank (or blame) my Facebook friends for this!

I love that my Facebook friends Caroline and Rachel have each started writing their own blogs. Caroline is chronicling her weight loss journey and training (at age 57!) for a half marathon later this summer. And Rachel's blog is about her organic garden and what it's like to be a young wife and mommy who works a full-time job outside the home.

Caroline is an administrator and Rachel is a pastry chef. Neither of them are professional writers, yet I think their blogs are a joy to read -- and that's not just because I happen to love them both. Their writing makes good reading not because they understand all the secrets of great literature, or because their grammar and punctuation are always perfect, but because they are telling their own unique truths. It's as plain and simple as that. And the truth, no matter who is telling it, is always wildly entertaining to me.

Now, I write for a living (such as it is). I know that lots of other people who write for a living have this hoity-toity opinion that only "real writers" should be doing all the writing around here; that everybody else should just sit down over there on that tiny chair with their hands folded neatly in their laps and shut their pie holes, and let the professionals handle the delicate operation of writing all the words because, you know, how many dangling modifiers and sentence fragments and subject-verb disagreements can the world possibly take before it spontaneously combusts and collapses in on itself in a whimpering, slobbering puddle o' split infinitives?

I, on the other hand, think that if you want to write then you should write, freely and confidently, even if you aren't always sure when to use an apostrophe or whether to write "who" or "whom." As long as you're telling your individual truth, it will be good and it will be unique - remember, you're the One and Only You There Is, so naturally your thoughts are one-of-a-kind originals, too.

Imagine what the world would be like if all of us -- those from the USA to Somalia to Israel to China to Iran and everywhere in between -- became a horde of fearless, prolific writers and also voracious readers. Perhaps we'd understand one another a lot more and fuss amongst ourselves a little less...

So whether you're a professional wordsmith or not, let's all promise to be like Caroline and Rachel and write more stuff down, OK? I intend to do my part. And as we do, let's also vow to remember these words from one of my writer heroes Brenda Ueland:

"...you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten -- happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another."