Bleeding ink

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

--Hemingway

 

I once advised a fellow blogger to write a post whenever he felt had something he felt compelled to say.  But not to write anything just for the sake of writing.

I offered this advice -- its soundness obvious --back when we were both writing a couple of times a week.  But he long ago abandoned his blog, and now ... well, if you check in on the Northwest Corner every so often, you've noted that I have written two posts in the last two months.  And neither was much more than a quick summary of a travel experience -- certainly nothing that required any real thought.

So what's up?  Am I just following my own advice? Do I write so little of late because I've stopped having anything to say? 

Part of my excuse is Facebook.  Ideas that used to result in a moderately long blog are now compressed into a short blurb on Facebook.  It's certainly easier.  And I get an instant indication of my readers' interest or lack thereof in what I had to say.  Instant gratification.  Or not.

But ideas on Facebook that require more than four sentences to convey run into a blank wall of indifference -- i.e., no one reads them -- which can be much more daunting than writing a blog, whose readership I can fondly imagine to lie in the thousands.  And even if I should get twenty "likes" on Facebook, I can't fool myself that I have said anything profound.

A more worrisome possible "excuse" is that because of advancing age or laziness or too many past posts -- I've run out of new ideas that might move me to write.  And yet, even within the past week my mind has been brooding over such issues as Donald Trump, the death of Oliver Sacks, the peculiar weather this year of the Northwest, readings I've been doing about Central Asia, the volatility of the stock market, the wisdom of Joan Didion, my nephew's new profession as a high school teacher, and the conflict between religious beliefs and one's duties as a governmental officer. 

Somehow, unfortunately, the national press seemed to have analyzed most of these subjects to death.  Why this should now concern me, when it never did in years past, I'm not sure.  Maybe I keep raising the bar for the quality of my writing -- which I suppose is admirable, but not if the bar's new height intimidates me into writing nothing at all.  After all, as I've discussed in earlier posts, I write primarily for myself -- to help clarify my own thinking.  I'm hardly a correspondent  for a newspaper or magazine, with a salary to earn and a reputation to maintain.

I seem to recall articles I've read about "writer's block."  The advice often given was that I should write anything -- anything at all, however trite or boring.  Just to get myself back into the habit of crystalizing thoughts and putting them to paper (or to blog, in my case). 

So consider this my trite and boring attempt at self-help.  Observe me on this first day of September, a new month and a new season, walking out of the vast literary desert of July and August into the promised land, into a land of milk and honey, into vast lush fields of literary fertility.  A come-back, the dawn of a new era of productive blogomania for the Northwest Corner. 

Well, we'll see.