I have decided that today is going to be “write a hell of a lot Thursday” and so far it’s off to a rather mediocre start. I’ve at least managed a blog post at Wiffli, and then there’s this one. I need to do a write-up of my Ragnar experience for The Loop, I have at three e-mails to friends to write, and then I want to get in some fiction.
But my wife woke up with a sore back, poor thing, and it’s pretty much knocked her out for the day. She’s got an appointment at the clinic in a short while, so I’ll take her to that, and I am not blaming her in the least for getting the way of my silly declaration. If anything, her unfortunate state has forced me to laser-focus on my plan—no messing about with video games and Reddit and peanut-butter & jelly sandwiches.
What is it, this compulsion to write? It’s not like anyone’s reading this stuff. I mean, sure, a few people here, a few people there, at least one person per e-mail. But it’s not like they’ll miss it if I don’t. So why do it?
Many years ago a friend said to me “you have a gift and if you don’t do something with it, that’s a sin.” I was flattered at the time, but if I think about it now, my “gift” is not that I write well, it’s that I want to write. And that’s it. On days when I do write I feel good, like I just built a barn. On days I don’t I feel bad, like the chickens and the cows and the horses are standing in the rain getting wet for no reason.
A dumb analogy but I’m trying to exert a distinction here between what it means to write well and what it means to just write. If you catch my meaning.
It’s all pointless, but then I guess everything’s pointless. Video games, cans of peanuts and caffeine that are just chewed, swallowed, digested and evacuated through bowels, TV shows about old families in England, pornography and a few minutes of self-pleasure. It’s not like I’m writing instead of building actual houses for actual people. And even if I were, those people, those houses, a few hundred years from now? All gone. Pointless.
So, let’s call it a middle-class compulsion. The poor struggle to survive, the rich survive to struggle, and the rest of us sit here navel gazing. Time to stop questioning the need and succumb to it. On to those emails. Sorry I’ve got nothing more pithy to say than that. How about a joke?
There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer.
When asked to define great, he said, “I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger!”
He now works for Microsoft writing error messages.