I’ve got a lot on my mind. These days, who hasn’t?
But for now, it’s just the one thing: writing. I’ve thought about and written about it almost all my life, but it’s the same old story. Teachers, friends, and even my wife have encouraged me to write. They didn’t push me to do it, just casual remarks, but it’s one of the constants of my life. But what stops me is me. (When is it ever not?)
I can write. I know that. I’m not among the best, but give me writing materials or some electronic equivalent and I’ll throw something down on the page, no problem. I can even guarantee it’ll be fluent, organized, and largely error-free.
But that’s just it, isn’t it? It all comes a little too easy for me. There’s no strife, no struggle, and little sense of effort. I think it, I write it. I feel it, I write. It’s almost mechanical even if it doesn’t look that way.
No, I don’t think I’m talented. I definitely don’t feel gifted. Being good at something is not the same as being talented or gifted. If anything, it has cursed me with the constant doubt that anything enduring can ever come from something so easily wrought. (Poor verb choice, but I can’t come with anything else right now.)
(The clock tells me it’s been fifteen minutes since I started writing this.)
So I struggle not with setting the ideas to words, but with trusting myself to write something true or meaningful. I fear I am a lightweight, a hack; someone who says a lot but knows little and means even less. From that kind of writers’ hell there is no escape.
This should be distinguished from modesty, false or otherwise. It is not an affectation but it can debilitate and affect the will to write. For how can a writer, who inexplicably entangles himself in notions of honesty and purity, ever come around to setting pen to paper and give it some measure of worth? Even in cases where writing is mandated — school, or work — he does not keep his work. If told he has done well, he looks his work over but fails to see how it differs from his lesser writings. They’re all him. And so he tosses them all away.
If there is one truth I have learned from beginning and then deleting several blogs over the past decade or so, it’s this: no one gives a good goddamn about my “integrity” to writing something “true.” And neither should I.
Because it is a crutch for my cowardice, not a beacon of truth.
Fuck my integrity. Just write something and fucking keep it.
Just because it’s a different river each time I step into it doesn’t mean I stop doing it. It’s the only reason to keep doing it.
So I will try, again. I will start each day with an hour of writing and keep doing it.
Because that’s all I can do.
