I think the thing about writing is that it's very, very easy to write.. I mean, most people have the ability to plunk down a piece of writing.. but it's very difficult to do well. whereas with other artforms like painting, drawing, music, acting and the like, it's difficult to even begin do those, much less do them well. I greatly admire anyone that creates their own music, as I imagine it must be quite hard to write original song lyrics, set them to a beat/melody/etc and then have enough talent leftover to sing them.

But most people, if forced, can write a story. Now it is likely that said story will be banal, cliche, and stupid, but they can still do it. But not a lot of people can get beyond the stick figure stage of art or the first lyric of a song, et cetera. And since so many people DO have writing on their personal pages, I think it's been sort of under-rated... I even see a lot of art rings that include such things as music, design, and of course the traditional art but exclude writing. This frustrates me, because writing is the only artform I'll ever be able to do with any sort of skill.

But I can see the reason why. A great deal of those in the 'teen personal page' subsection of the Internet just toss writing onto their page to pad their content total, without really giving any thought to its presence at all. So after seeing miles and miles of the same 'writings' and poetry, it tends to lose its meaning. Art has become another staple recently, but since, like I said, the average person hasn't evolved past the stick figure stage, it's not all that common yet.

Whine whine whine... gee, I wonder if this could be classified as a 'rant'...teen pages have lots of those, too... =p