On finding yourself in the unique position of having a blog and not knowing what to write for it.
I’m extremely fortunate: I have a position of great privilege afforded me by my nationality, my race, my sex, my class and even my education. I get to study creative writing, spend my time reading and writing, a thing many people would give an arm to have the spare time for.
As part of this education, I have to start up a blog and post at least once a week. That seems fair, entirely normal, keeping up-to-date on the trends of well-known writers such as Neil Gaiman who regularly blog about the goings-on in their lives or the writer-world they inhabit.
And that sounds like a good thing to do. It sounds important: building an image of myself as a would-be professional with my own website and interesting things to say. But for one fundamental flaw: I don’t have interesting things to say.
I could tell you all about the dissertation I am writing, about the intricacies of making characters and weaving them into retellings of Cornish history and Celtic myths, but I can’t show you any of the work so it remains completely without context. I could tell you about the books I’ve read, about the poems I’ve devoured, but they don’t relate to my ‘craft’ (a requisite part of the assessment criteria for this blog).
Instead I’m left with a blog post vacuously exploring the emptiness of my creativity. I feel like a failure. But, ‘failure is just another name for much of real life,’ as Margaret Atwood wrote, and so here I am writing a blog about the existence of the blog. Writing a post about knowing not what to write for the post.
I’m to write about my ‘craft’. Well, what is that? I write primarily for performance, my words are to be spoken aloud; performance poetry, podcasts, radio plays, theatre. Perhaps, then, that is why I struggle to commit code to page in this purely written form. Perhaps I have lost the playfulness of the spoken in exchange for the literal black-and-white of the page.
That, at least, explains something about my craft, does it not? At least acknowledging that I don’t have any ideas gives me an idea, learning nothing about blogging teaches me something about myself. And maybe next week I’ll have something better to say, but for now all I can do is be grateful for the ability to write, to do something I love, and to be able to fail sometimes (a lot of the time) and ‘get back on the horse that threw you, as they used to say. They also used to say: you learn as much from failure as you learn from success.’
Persistence is what will drive me through, as it always has. The persistence to get back on the horse, the persistence to generate content, the persistence to get out of bed in the morning. Persistence is a skill you learn through desperation. Being desperate to write, to produce, to create, leads to this blog, to this education and – hopefully somewhere down the line – to a job doing those things.