Back online

To those who have occasionally read my blog(s), I have been working hard on various writing and other projects over 2009. I have a superstitious fear of talking about unfinished projects, so I won't indulge in describing those unfinished projects here.

Actually, I suspect this is more than a superstition. Speaking for myself, I have always found it useful to distinguish between writing and talking about writing. It seems to me that, far from complementing one another, these processes tend to be mutually exclusive. Whenever I become serious about writing something, I begin the first stages of the writing process. If I'm not serious (and being serious or not serious is largely unconscious) then, considering my own behaviour in retrospect, I am much more likely to mention a particular writing project in conversation. For the most part, however, talking about writing simply seems to get in the way of the actual writing process, a diversion of that peculiar and sacred energy.

To those who are kind enough to occasionally ask my advice on how to begin writing, I usually say "If you want to write, the best advice I can offer from my own experience is to stop talking about it and start writing." An American writer, Mary Horton Vorse (1881-1966) wrote, more succinctly, "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair." When I was looking up the source of this saying on the net, I came across the following set of quotations on writing assembled by Mary Yerkes, which I can recommend as a short but succinct collection of views on writing mainly by other writers. The Mary Yerkes web-site has a Christian and self-help flavour, and I regard myself as a troubled atheist, but there are other little jewels on the writer's art. Another is "You can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club." (Jack London, 1876-1916).

On the subject of writing about writing, to what extent does a blogger owe it to his or her readers to at least keep up communications during a period when the urge to communicate is fallow, or when energies are directed in another direction? My mind says if blogging is a form of expression, when that desire to express is not present, the blogger should lie fallow. At the same time, I apologise to those two people and a cat who read my expostulations on line for my lengthy absence.