I don’t feel like writing but I can’t stay away from the machine. I feel like all my writing is like dust in the wind. I wonder what the point is. I wonder why I care so much and why I’m still trying to prove myself after all these years of struggle. I think why not give up, go on an adventure, escape, live, love……?
Writing isn’t meant to be struggle, not for me, it’s meant to be my great passion that I can now finally pursue. It isn’t meant to be like my years spent working in a dark prison struggling to improve things, often struggling against the powers that be.
Writing is my freedom so why do I make it my fight? Why can’t I just pipe down and stop worrying about the outcomes? Why not just write, which is what I’m always advocating, and cut out the striving? Isn’t it time to stop worrying about what others achieve? Why set the bar so high and care so much when I don’t make it over?
Will Self understands – ‘People say my writing is dreadful, pretentious, self-seeking shit – they say it a lot. Other people say my writing is brilliant, beautifully crafted and freighted with the most sublime meaning. The criticism, no matter how virulent, has long since ceased to bother me, but the price of this is that the praise is equally meaningless. The positive and the negative are not so much self-cancelling as drowned out by that carping, hectoring internal voice that goads me on and slaps me down all day every day.’
I suspect the solution lies in getting on with some writing – I’ll let you know….
On ‘writing is not meant to be a struggle’. Pray god if only. But then, it comes down to each of us. For me, when I get the time, writing is a universal constant against which, one can measure the complexeity and change of mood, emotions and feelings as I write, against the un-changing task of writing. I did once spend some time trying to iron myself out, and change my perception of writing. I only ended up being less productive and becoming more intent on making sure that I felt one step away from enlightenment each time before I began to write. So now, I just take the rumbustuous din with the adazzle, soaring with the eagles, or clamouring around like a bear with a sore head, I just write. And on you wonderful weekly missives, ‘who is a writer’, I say, one is what one does!
Thanks Warren – you’re so right – the only thing to do is keep on writing regardless – for me it is the constant without which I’d probably allow mood and feeling to overtake evrything else – we are indeed what we do – A