I haven’t been writing much of late. It is, perhaps, the dawning realisation that I have two weeks to write a politics essay about a topic I don’t particularly have much interest in. Ahh, fuck it, we’ll do the one about democracy. I can ramble about that for 1500 words.
Anyway. I suppose it’s been nice not feeling the urge to write so much. I mean, sometimes you need some space to just let ideas gel and emerge and form themselves into a coherent form, and sometimes that doesn’t happen when all you’re doing is writing.
Other writers might call this spate of not being able to write ‘writer’s block’. But I don’t see it that way. I’m not blocked, I’m just giving space to ideas. For me, in spite of my feeling that I would die if I couldn’t write, I don’t spend most of my time writing. I sleep, I shower, I eat, I watch TV and videos, I game, I go to class, I study, I spend time on public transport, I occasionally work. When I have the time, I write. When the muses prod me enough, I write. When I absolutely can’t keep the words in any longer, I write.
Being a writer is a strange thing for some people to understand. Just like I don’t really grasp what it’s like to be a musician, so non-writers don’t get writers and why we do what we do, and how. I always have words singing in my head. They’re like… little scrappy ideas. Sometimes, they don’t take long to be fully formed, sometimes they take much longer, and some don’t get written at all.
So sometimes an idea needs to float around in my brain until it’s ready to be written, and to me, just because I’m not physically writing words on paper doesn’t mean I suddenly have writer’s block because I’m still thinking about writing and those little ides that wanted more time to develop. That time to develop can mean the difference between something getting finished and something remaning as a little scrappy idea I thought was interesting at the time. If you looked at my hard drive and my inbox, you’ll find many ideas that I wrote down as they came to me and subsequently went nowhere after that.
There are weeks when I’m struggling to think of something to write here, and certainly university aids in giving me suitable material on which to ruminate until some sort of idea forms in my head enough to write about it. If anything, this blog is full of little scrappy ideas I could use for other things if I wanted to develop them further. If, you know, I had the time and inspiration to do so. Which I don’t. So there.
I’m an inherently disorganised person. I always have been. I’m also in no rush to get things done. I finish things in my own time and in my own way. I have infinite patience with life. Things happen when they happen. Why hurry? Life’s too short to rush through it at breakneck speed. You’ll miss all the good things that need time to be seen, rather than glanced at and forgotten.