Sometimes I find it relatively easy to write. For example, if I’ve experienced a particularly memorable scenario, or if I’m able to conjure poignant moments from my past and transform them from a hazy collage of reminiscence, into a carefully constructed riposte (if my memory allows). Occasionally, I have this surprising ability to exercise an element of my brain which amazes even me; a dark hallway of cerebral absurdity which permits me to spawn anecdotes of such wanton folly and banality that it is testament to the resolve of both myself, in that I am able to create such ridiculous diatribe, and the reader, in that they actually spend the time entertaining it. That is of course, if anyone actually reads it; I humour myself by pretending that they do.
Sometimes, however, I get this sort of writer’s block. Although, it’s less writer’s block, more an inability to apply myself; a sort of lingering procrastination that can persist for weeks or months. It’s not that I don’t want to write, quite the contrary…when I am not writing I almost melancholically miss it, and with every day that passes where I don’t immerse myself in some literary application, I become increasingly concerned that I’ve lost the knack.
When I do muster the inclination to write something, I begin to question why I write in the first place. My ‘readership’ is so magnificently diminutive that it is egotistical to even refer to it as such, and thus it is implausible, no, an impossibility, that I could be writing for praise or adoration. Couple that with the fact that my material offers little in the way of value, or even creates any remote modicum of personal joy, and I am left bereft as to my motivation. So why do it?
I mean, if I sit and ponder it for a while, I realise (and am therefore blissfully aware), that I’m no real writer…merely a two-bit hack with no real substance; a literary fugazi with a poorly marketed outlet, peddling some hashed together anecdotes written in a style I am sure most editors would be fucking appalled at.
As far as I can surmise then, the value in this whole wordy vanity project is that it occupies my mind, separates the reality from the fantasy, the bants from the pants, the shit from the skit. It immerses my brain in hours of literary contemplation, steering it from a whirl of psychological complexity and needless fret. The byproduct of course, is reams of material that I can peddle to family, friends and acquaintances (forcing them to either pretend to have read it or, if they have read it, leaving them perplexed as to what it’s even for). And in a way, that amuses me.
