Words and what to do with them

It’s dawned on me how much my thoughts and interests now revolve around writing.

This web­log encour­ages me to write bits and pieces most days. When I’m on a run of good posts, it’s excit­ing (and if I get feed­back about what I’ve said, even bet­ter). When things to say dry up, as they obvi­ously do at times, I’m always keen to find new sub­jects to write about, and not neg­lect this out­let. While I may not be an ace web designer, the know­ledge that I can now put a site together (even if it does involve tear­ing my hair out because of HTML) is equally excit­ing — I’ve got two site ideas on the go at the moment, both offer­ing a new format for my writ­ing and my thoughts. Behind the scenes, I con­tinue to write stuff in private, and I still indulge in far too many long email con­ver­sa­tions where I often treat what I’m writ­ing in the same care­ful way I would do if I was writ­ing a let­ter with pen and paper, rather than the imper­sonal short­hand of email.

This is all good. I haven’t got so much bene­fit out of my writ­ing in years. I think, in a lot of ways, becom­ing increas­ingly famil­iar with the inter­net has caused that change. I always wrote a lot in the past — but once it was writ­ten, that was it. There was noth­ing I could act­ively do with it. Nowhere it could be dis­played. No hope of get­ting it pub­lished. The net has changed that. I dis­covered that, in a mat­ter of seconds, I could have some­thing pos­ted to a dis­cus­sion forum, a mail­ing list, or any site that’s open to con­tri­bu­tions. But even that wasn’t enough, and I began to wish for my own little corner of the web that was mine. All mine.

And yet …

About a month ago, some­body whom I’ve only recently got to know took me to task, in no uncer­tain terms, about my tal­ents (look, I know how boast­ful this sounds, but bear with me). They poin­ted out that I do all this writ­ing, but that I take it no fur­ther. I’m not doing any­thing con­struct­ive with it, in real terms. The sad fact is that the vast major­ity of writ­ing here is eph­em­eral — in the case of the web­log, it’s on screen for a max­imum of five days, and then it’s gone. Of course, there’s an archive — but real­ist­ic­ally, how many people have the time, patience or, frankly, the interest to go fer­ret­ing around in there?

How­ever, I think it’s exactly this longer-term vis­ion of doing some­thing with my writ­ing skills that is stop­ping me, to be hon­est. Over the past few months, and for a vari­ety of reas­ons, I’ve sat down at my com­puter with what I thought were bril­liant ideas simply fight­ing to get out of my head. And … noth­ing. Not a sol­it­ary word. Shortly after, the ideas dis­ap­pear and don’t come back.

What’s the reason for this reac­tion? I’m not sure, but deep down I think it’s a mix­ture of ter­ror at doing any­thing more ser­i­ous and struc­tured, lack of self-confidence and, of course, all the accoutre­ments of a busy life that often don’t allow a per­son to sit down and con­cen­trate — really con­cen­trate — for more than a few moments at a time.

Is there a solu­tion? I’m hope­ful. I think there might be. I think the secret might be to con­tinue what I’m doing — incess­antly writ­ing, in all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways and for dif­fer­ent formats. I trust in the fact that, one day, it’ll hap­pen — the “big idea” that will sud­denly bring together all the hun­dreds of other little ideas that spin round my mind. And then these ideas will bring forth a won­der­ful array of new ideas. When that seis­mic event occurs, I think the writ­ing that nor­mally eludes me at times like this will begin to flow in the same easy and sat­is­fy­ing way it does in other situ­ations. There’ll be no stop­ping me.

My only prob­lem is wait­ing for this to hap­pen. I’m impa­tient, and I want it to hap­pen now.

(All the above ques­tions are rhet­or­ical, but feel free to answer them if you wish.)