Writers Block: I Write About Writing

I’ve just spent the last half hour looking for Friday blogging memes. That’s how desperate I have become. 7 Quick Takes–my usual Friday pleasure–is a mile too far. Seven Whole Takes? Can we narrow it down to three, or one?

Has anyone noticed? The sudden and catastrophic descent into writer’s block? The repetition and return to the same old tired themes one more time? The inability to tie any thought up neatly in a clever and satisfying way in the last two words? I’m plum tired, my mind is tired, and my fingers are correspondingly bumbling and slow. Writing this week has been like pushing a stupid square desk up the stairs, losing your grip, having it slide back onto the foot, crying out, and then starting to push on it again, for the seventy-third time.

The question is, in a moment like this, why still write? Why open up the stupid plain white page and glumly stare, casting about in the recesses of a stupid, tired mind to find something to say. Too many things are being said anyway. Why add to them?

I ask myself this question a lot, in a plaintive self justifying way. There should be no reason to post on an Internet blog every single day, except maybe to puff up and expand the self. The reason I always give is Mental Health and her dubious cousin Self Care. Self Care is all the rage. I write for myself, I say, and it doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. I need something to stir my own faintly glimmering pool of creative energy. If I don’t write, I will have to knit, or worse, vacuum the house.

In a few weeks I will be reaching the Ten Years of Blogging Milestone. Way back in 2006, new babe in arms, when the whole world was rushing out to start a blog, I took the plunge and opened a blogger account and called it An Undercurrent of Hostility. You know, because I’m a nice Christian Pastor’s Wife padding around the kitchen barefoot and having another baby every year. Nothing says Christian Women’s Blogging like the word Hostility.

You’ll be surprised to learn, I didn’t make it big. I blogged a couple of times a week and amused myself posting pictures and complaining about the laundry and the children. One of my first posts was called KJS in Pants and in it I maligned and mocked the then presiding bishop of the episcopal church. Well, her trousers.

Over the years I began to feel bad for being so mean, even though there was still so much stuff to be mean about. And I felt bad for having the word “hostility” in my title. I mean, I am a little hostile, because how could I not be. But still, I would have gotten more followers if I had written at something called An Undercurrent of Love, which I can’t say out-loud without slightly throwing up in my mouth.

Someone tried to comment on my post yesterday, the bulk of which you won’t see because I didn’t put it up, and said, in the middle, “So…your first impulse is to respond to things that you disagree with is sarcasm and derision? Nice to know. Empathy? Piffle.” To which I respond, “Yeah”. Isn’t that why you come here? Because I make a meal out of saying nothing and saying it mean? A lot of things should be met with derision and sarcasm–evil, for instance, and foolishness. Hostility towards, say, the devil is appropriate and right. And that, truly, is the focus of my hostility and derision.

So anyway, I’ve been writing for a long time. And here I still am. And if you want me to write about any particular subject, you should say, because I got nothin.

See you tomorrow!