on not reading posts about other peoples' writing processes

I don't like reading posts on other writers' writing processes. On where a writer is, what their techniques and tips and tools are. It's such a personal relationship, my relationship with my writing, that, for me, nuts and bolts blog posts about writing are always just noise--and anxiety-producing noise at that. So, you know, I skip them. More power and blessings to everyone who writes them and reads them--I'm certainly not saying they're bad. I think the community and transparency and sharing they represent are, basically, goog things. 

But I wonder about why it is I shy from them when, apparently, so many people seem to appreciate them.

Now, I'm distinguishing this from the kind of nuts and bolts things you can learn in a workshop, like, say, Clarion; I remember that long (long) ago first week of Clarion West w/ Howard Waldrop. After years in undergrad and graduate writing workshops at universities with lit writers who treated short fiction structure like some arcane, unspeakable osmosis one could only imbibe, but not describe, Howard was eye-opening and thoroughly refreshing. To paraphrase, he said to almost everyone in the group (er, except me, but it was still enlightening): "Here's what this story is trying to be about; here's why it's not working and what needs to happen for it to work." And gave useful examples and details. I still enjoy a workshop now and then, the give and take with other writers, talking about specific things in stories--face to face--that's rewarding and fun.

And back when I first started writing, when I was oh so very young, I read essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, C.J. Cherryh, Samuel Delaney, and other writers I admired, on writing; later in life, I enjoyed Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.

But there's a limit to the usefulness of such, I think. And I reached it some time ago. The creak and stretch, lift, fall, connection, and bloom of my relationship with writing, with my writing, are so internal and personal I find it hard to parse them, and almost--I don't know, painful, wrong, indecent?--to do so in a public format.

Though perhaps what we mostly get from blog posts about process are shallow descriptions of those deeper workings? And everyone's way of going about that kind of description is going to be different and speak to different people more or less meaningfully. I don't know; in any case, it is, for me, noise. If I don't trust my gut and go with that, I'm lost. Being engaged in the operations of my own writing, from deepest germination through growing pains to the scritchings of twig and flower against the sky is the surest joy and reward of writing I know and if I spend too much time listening to other people, I lose my connection with that.

So, that's me. What about you?