It is writing

Too complex a subject for a quick blog post, but bear with me. Writing breeds writing, a subject which I’ve discussed in these electronic pages before now. And this knowledge is what lay behind my ultimately doomed attempt to blog more regularly last year (yes, I know, didn’t work out too well). I say doomed, but, brief though it was, it reinforced a personal belief which is: writing begets writing.

The process of sitting down to actually put pen to paper kicks things off, it’s important to actually engage with the act, even if what you’re coming out with is utter garbage. You never know what may come from it. One of my mini-essays from last year found new life in a poem by the excellent Andrew Taylor. I’ve parlayed my various abandoned ideas of the past into a new and potentially interesting project. I’ve attempted this year to keep a diary (I say attempted, succeeded, there is an entry of sorts for each day thus far), though, in the interests of full disclosure, I feel it incumbent upon me to point out that the purpose was also to aid my increasingly poor memory (don’t do drugs, kids, or not as many, at any rate), there was a concurrent attempt to write a poem daily, but that fell by the wayside fairly sharpish. That said, the simple constraint of forcing myself to sit down and do something has generated texts which would otherwise not exist. One way or another, every day something’s gone down on paper (okay, not paper per se, but you get the drift).

Now, this is the first part, but it’s only a part. Getting things written is one thing. Getting things written that are any good is another thing entirely. Finding time to actually do something with the things that are written that are good is something else altogether. But one thing’s for sure, it’s a damn sight easier getting something out there when you’ve written it in the first place.