6:34 p.m. I used to be a weekly columnist at a daily newspaper. It was very traumatic. I never realized before I started what havoc it was going to wreak to my mental health and to the people around me. And that was only once a week, not every day. But I was just a kid.

I was a mere 18 years old at the time. I'd very much wanted to go to college, and I applied to three Catholic colleges, but I knew it was a futile gesture. My mother needed me at home, helping with the housework and the bills. I pretended that I had a choice in the matter when I was still in high school, but I knew I would never live in a college dorm.

And, I never did -- except for one glorious summer in 1976 when I went to an all-woman's writing conference at Hartwick College in upstate New York. I met lesbians! I smoked a cigar! For two irreplaceable weeks, I lived in an atmosphere of all-writing, all-the-time, including poetry. We had to read aloud the first night, over the sound of crickets chirruping in the grass and melting ice cubes clinking against sweating glass and rocking chairs creaking over bare wooden planks.

One woman's husband didn't trust her and swore that the kids just wanted to watch mommy a little while longer before they headed back down the turnpike in their pickup, and so she tried to read her piece but kept looking up with a panicked glance at the three pale ghost faces on the porch, stone still, outside the wide dark window. She was a brilliant writer, and she left early, before the two weeks were up.

It was the first writing community I had ever seen up close, but I certainly didn't feel a part of it. My family might not have been lingering on the actual front porch of the big Victorian faculty house, but I could still see their faces, feel their breath, hear their sighs. I was there for the intense classes, not the chirpy camaraderie, and I knew it was going to be a long time before I would even have a few spare minutes to look at my notes again once I got back home.

Which is how it's always been for me, by the way. Spare minutes, scattered notes, express trains of thought passing silently in the night. Mail call! Roll call! Call waiting and forwarding ... waiting for the traffic light to change, the check to clear, the bread to rise. I wrote my first novel about a crazy quilt, straight from index cards, assembled on the kitchen table after dinner and before breakfast.

Now, I've virtually abandoned my extremely useful, but private HyperCard electronic journal and all its millions of links and topics, and I've begun to write a daily column again, here on the web. This time I'm not so young. This time I hope to get it right. If I do, I will post a complete set of how-to's and roadmaps, I promise. It's the least I can do.

I bring a certain -- experience -- to this job. For the last 35 years I've maintained a public facade and a private face. They are not the same thing, but they are both alive and they both change daily. If you realize too late that it isn't going to be the "real" you that you're selling when you write about your life, you're going to become very unhappy sooner or later. Nobody cares about the real you, except of course, the real you.

Now it's a tricky thing, building a sturdy facade that can take all kinds of weather and years of neglect and still look so inviting and capacious that people will want to visit. The trick is this: you have to tell the truth. You can't lie. You can't make stuff up. You can't pretend. People can tell the difference.

And believe me, I'm talking about writing fiction, as well as non.

Especially fiction.

If you're writing nonfiction you have to learn how not to tell everything, but instead how to tell just the one right thing. If you're writing fiction, you have to pretend you've just taken a truth serum. You've been beaten up and there's a bright white light shining in your eyes. You won't be able to remember the exact names and places and dates, but by God, your life will depend on getting the real gist across. The deeper truth behind the names, which nobody cares about, the places, which are irrelevant, and the dates, which change every time we fall asleep.

Anyway, these are things I wish I'd known when I started my column 34 years ago. That it wasn't really me up there on the page. That I didn't have to tell everything. That I would really like a chance to do it again, sometime, and to do it the right way.

And that's the truth.

Tomorrow.