A friend once told me that writing is a skill like any other; you get good and stay good at it by continuing to use it. So here we are with nearly 250 days between now and my last post on this thing. Do we let it die? Do I try to post something every day? Do I change the format and talk about things that others might find interesting?
These are are the questions that anyone, if there is anyone out there reading, would be asking. I know that I have stopped reading blogs of people who post more frequently than I do, but not frequently enough. I have no excuses; I feel no need to make them. Life gets in the way. And then there is the problem of when something that you used to love becomes a chore, another item on a checklist of things to do. I sure as hell didn’t think five years ago that I would think of creative writing as a chore.
Personally, I blame the liberal arts. As a history major at my university, I had a tremendous blast writing about things for classes. At least I did at first. But when you have to write your ninth paper on the economic history of 17th century Russia, you start to lose a taste for it. Stories that I started writing and interesting concepts that I had diagramed out on napkins and notebooks dwindled and shrank. Ideas came less and less frequently. I think two things happened here.
As I matriculated, I read more and more than I ever had at any point previous. Not only did I continue to read fiction and non-fiction for pleasure, but the obscure books and articles that I read for classes and term papers introduced me to new ideas and styles of writing that I had never been exposed to before.
I came to a few revelations about my work and learned a few things:
- My writing was good for what it was, but there was so much that could be done with the style, the grammar, the motivation of characters, etc.
- I never quite felt like my work was ever going to be good enough.
- I finally embraced the drafting system of writing, not formally but enough to re-read work and to edit it.
Then college ended. I graduated, got a comfy civil service job, and have been there ever since. I wouldn’t call my position mentally or intellectually challenging, but I have forced myself to use my writing skills and my brain more than I thought necessary for that type of position. I pushed my superiors to challenge me and they tried. However, with that responsibility came more paperwork, more emails to send, more forms to fill out, more procedures to document. I seem to have discovered that I have a limit to the amount of characters that I will type on a computer screen in any given day. If I have to deal with this number or push myself, I feel exhausted mentally. In short I had become complacent. I went from using one excuse, “I can’t write on my blog/novel/short story/TV idea because I’m working on this American History paper” to “I just wrote a 12-page critique of an idiotic idea that someone at work wants to do and I’m too fucking tired.”
In fact the phrase “I’m too fucking tired” became common-place around my house post-graduation. First it was just me decompressing from a stressful stay at university. Enjoying the fact that I no longer needed to stay up late writing term papers or feel guilty about not reading the 100 pages about women in the 1920s that was due to be discussed at length in the next small section. Then it was because I was being to Epicurian; places to go, things to do. And finally it became a habit.
Not that I haven’t tried to break this habit. Starting this blog was one idea, writing a book was another. I tried my hat at National Novel Writing Month. Didn’t take. I hadn’t spent enough time, nor enough effort in developing characters. Sometimes I would stare for hours at a piece of paper and not write a thing down. This is something that I desperately wanted to try, but I couldn’t get it going.
Recently, I have lamented the fact that used to love to write to my fiancée. I bemoaned how I don’t have the patience any more for it. It’s a shame too, because my writing was one of the things that she was attracted to when we were going out. I have been thinking about this for a while and I finally realized that this was the place to get back in the saddle. I tried the Doctor Who reviews and I may get back to that at some point, but I felt I was restricting myself too much about what I put up here.
That stops now. From now on I will be less stringent about my standards, not that they were that high to begin with. Content is king. Sometimes it will be little bits about my day, sometimes about how awesome a hockey game was, how much certain aspects of life irritate me, or tidbits of my day. It could be an article about Apple or Macintosh, or one about how much snow is on the ground. Just be prolific is the new motto. We’ll see how it goes from there. It won’t always be great, but at least it will be.
To those of you still out there, I’ll try to be more regular, but I need some more mental fiber before that happens.
