Of Writing and Muses

Or better yet, of writer’s block - that feeling that no matter how deep your thoughts, you’ll never find the right way to put them on paper.

I am not talking here about writing for the web - that thing is always easy, because there are resources to inspire you. Most of the writing done for the web is repeating ideas redundantly and hoping for the best - as in shares, comments, likes, and everything else that goes in the mix to make you an authority in your certain field.

Writing for the web is business and there are enough instances of mediocre content gone viral, because the people of the web don’t really read. They scan. Add some good illustrations to your texts, put an idiotic title that begins with “how to” and make sure to present your ideas as a list. There, now you are a web writer. Go pat yourself on the back.

The other kind of writing that comes from the heart needs more than a template to follow. It needs the muses. Today’s writers count obsessively the words they put on paper on a given day, and many produce enough content to fill hundreds of pages in less than a month - the NaNoWriMo challenge comes to mind. For these people, writing appears to be an exercise in productivity. Many of them are probably fine story tellers - still, I cannot help but wonder, how many produced something worth reading during such a challenge? It’s impossible to hemorrhage words on demand and make them as meaningful as they could have been given more time.

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” —George Orwell

Orwell’s horrible, exhausting struggle is no more. Contemporary writers produce based on word count. Their sentences read like something written for the mind of a ten year old. Many ideas are great, but, because of the time versus words-per-day pressure, the stories end weak, void of substance, and the writing style is facile, void of personality. It is the age of the story that tells, because the art of showing is lost.So here I am, another day staring at the blank screen, understanding that I have a long way to go to produce something worth reading by the very small public I still believe in.

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” —Virginia Woolf

I know where my book - The Burn - is going. The ideas are there, vivid and begging to be brought to life. But the words fail me today. They have failed me for weeks now. I found a voice, but it keeps silent more often than I like to admit.

“Style is to forget all styles.” —Jules Renard

Every day I write is spectacular. Today is just another day at work, and a day that hopefully will bring the blessing of the muses.