There's a moment every day when I think, "I should have written about that in my blog," but then I realize that instead of planting the seeds that would grow into a story, I put them in boxes on a shelf called Twitter, or Tumblr, or Google Plus.
They're nice seeds and all, and they look great in their individual boxes, preserved for years to come, but they never get a chance to grow into something more than just seeds. That's sort of sad, I think, and I always promise myself that I'm going to come back here and write something every single day, and give myself one assignment and deadline a week… but I'm just not disciplined enough to do that right now, and I haven't been for close to a year.
It's not that I don't love telling stories, but I sort of feel like a band that's been on tour so long — and having so much fun doing it — they haven't gone into the studio to cut an album in so long, they've forgotten how to do it.
In “Collected Stories” the character Ruth tells the younger writer, Lisa, that she should never tell a story because it gets rid of the need to write it. That really resonated with me. Blogging is much the same. If you toss something up on twitter/plus/facebook wherever, then you have “told” the story, and there is less urgency to write it. I have to be very careful about how and what I share on social media because I know the shared things probably won’t become good writing.
Wil, it’s not quantity, but the quality that counts. I still love what I read on your blog. That’s why I’m still here after 10 years!
If something strikes you as an amazing story, you will come back to it. The really great stories won’t stop eating away at your mind until it gets told. So don’t be down on yourself for not telling any of those stories. Now your discipline is another matter.
Hi Wil, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for your blog. I only discovered it after seeing you collating paper for Jenny Lawson last year. However frequently or infrequently you post I look forward to reading. I especially like it when you post your fiction. I LOVED Just a Geek! I hope you don’t mind, I posted a quote of yours at my desk: “But the point isn’t to be perfect. The point is to get excited and make something creative.” Thanks!
I get that. What works for me is to make a deadline to create something, but never post it. No quality pressure, no length pressure, just some rambling that nobody will ever see.
It’s surprising how fast it becomes easy again, and share-able.
My friend Matt and I were talking the other day about this very thing, about how as artists (writing: me; photography and film: him) we both get that “stuck” feeling, there’s inspiration but no motivation so we don’t produce anything, or there’s motivation but no inspiration so we don’t produce anything.
During the course of our conversation we spoke about how we’ve got that proper work ethic that we apply to our daily jobs of home life and income production but in order to feel like we’re accomplishing anything we’ve got to apply that same work ethic to our art as well. I cited your posts about “getting excited and making things” as well as your notes about your writing process and how you shine a remarkable light on not only the times when the story just seems to leap from mind to paper but when there are struggles to produce even a few lines.
When we ended our phone call Matt said he was going to send me something that he’d been reading, that he thought would be helpful to us both. I received The War of Art http://www.stevenpressfield.com/the-war-of-art/ on Friday night and have already found myself beginning to identify the forms of my personal Resistance and am resetting my personal goals so I can work as diligently on my writing as I do in caring for my family and at my “other” job.
Wil, you are a major source of inspiration in this, as much as the book Matt sent me. And it helps, more than you know, knowing that someone so amazingly creative and talented in storytelling has days where he too struggles with Resistance. Thank you.
Hmm…I wonder what posts by you I’m missing by not having Twitter. I guess I need to upgrade my old rotary dial cell phone.
Dude after 10 years and having a busy life I think we all understand that sometimes their isn’t much to say.
I have been using Twitter and Google+ for a while, and yes, they can be nice tools. For what they are. But I can’t shake the feeling that they are too limited, the bandwidth too narrow.
Reading a blog is like listening to a friend tell a story, while you share a bourbon next to a fireplace. Whereas Twitter feels like shouting small talk over the too-loud music at a party, while nursing a cheap beer in a plastic cup.
Hey Wil! I love your writing and always look forward to a new blog post. Your personal stories are awesome – but I’m going to use my comment to suggest writing short (or flash, if you will) fiction to get the process rolling again. I really enjoyed 239 Sycamore St. and Hunter.
I don’t know if this will help at all, but when I find myself wanting but unable to write I like to screw with my perspective. I pretend I’m writing a campaign (you know, for my friends that refuse to play D&D anymore) – I figure if I can come up with an adventure that would keep the interest of players, it might be readable all on its own, too. I find I’m less resistant to throwing babblish ideas at the page and worry a lot less about the final product.
This tactic eventually brings my attention to something more manageable. Maybe I decide I can drop the fantasy world entirely, having created a character that I want to transition to some other realm. Or write something “deep” about the human condition. Whatever.
Oh! Or maybe you could throw out some ideas in a Radio Free Burrito podcast and see what kind of feedback you get. It’s often much easier to vocalize creative thoughts – writing has this wonderful ability to stop us in our tracks when we notice our typos and grammar fails.
So…okay. Didn’t mean to cause a flood there. Seriously, though, I feel the need to directly express: RFB! I am so in love with your podcast, new episodes would be amazing <3
Plant those seeds in a burrito, sir, and watch them grow. 🙂
When I was doing my research for my dissertation, I made the same mistake: talking about what I was discovering, instead of writing it down. Bad idea, since now I have to write it up and it’s harder to remember. Smaller outlets act more like drains – ideas slip away, since the essential point has already been made. However, if there were a way to collect the G+ and Twitter posts, they could serve as a type of journal, or idea repository. Just thinkin’ out loud here.
I hate social media with a passion. One of the many reasons why I hate it is that tweeting apparently erodes everyone’s interest in actually writing anything. It’s not just you that says that these days, and if I had a buck for every prolific tweeter who lost all interest in writing more than one sentence at a time…I’d be pretty loaded these days.
Of course, you probably know that the remedy to this problem is to, well…not only tweet everything you want to mention. Blog about it FIRST and let that seed grow…
A-ha! I have been stuck for something to write (I’ve considered writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over). I think I shall pick a tweet a day, semi-randomly, and write from there and just see where it takes me.
Thank you, sir!
This is the severaleth time I’ve seen you talk about this in a relatively short period. I think (and I empathize, boy, do I) that you have said what you had to say, you don’t feel the urge to say more in this format; the shorthand you have with the people who know and love you is sufficient and thus the shorthand-friendly forums are full of you while this one is falling dormant.
The weight of the past is holding you back. You wrote about it, so why write about it again? It is true that people have short memories and don’t often go backwards in time on the internets, but YOU know you wrote it and saying it again (even if slightly differently)…just gets old.
Much as I hate to say it, I think you need to close up shop here. You need closure so that you can find a new beginning. It’s time to come out of exile and start a new blog and go through all the struggles that doing that will mean; they will shape the blog, and you, and something new will come and you will have something to write about again and you will find new readers (while losing some of the old) and…life, my one-sided friend, is ever-changing, and ever forward, and a new journey will always, eventually, present itself, if you keep open to it.
I believe you know something about going boldly…
I know, me too. I’m not a regular blogger or anything but I am a freelance copywriter and I need to do it to exercise the writing muscle, you know? But Facebook, twitter, tumblr… lets me put it into one sentence when sometimes it could be a page. The internet seems to be shortening my attention span, not only for reading things in depth, but creating them as well. : \
Just wondering if the title for this post came from a Wilco song?