Creating a new button on my website should take about five minutes. It would be a five minute task, except for the fact that I always forget how to do it. Each year between Christmas and New Years I need to add a new button to archive the upcoming year’s blog entries, and this year it took me an hour and a half to get it done. First I unsuccessfully tried to make the button on my own. Second, I watched the online tutorial and failed to see what it was I was doing wrong. Third, I repeatedly followed the instructions in the tutorial, seemingly the the same way each time, and got it to work on the sixth try. Only after I had a functioning archive button for the new year did I settle into writing the first blog of 2024.
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If the definition of writer’s block is the inability to put words to paper, then I don’t have writer’s block. Lately I’ve been putting down lots of words. The problem is that very few of them work well together. For the past two months, I’ve written drafts for three potential book chapters, and all three remain outside the “good” folder on my computer’s desktop. In all three instances, I tried to bring together disparate concepts into a single essay, only to discover that the connections between the concepts felt forced. For example, just this morning I scrapped 3,000 words where I used the differences between Confucianism and Taoism to introduce the importance of leisure and play. If you asked me today why I thought ancient Chinese philosophy and leisure were closely related, I wouldn’t have a good answer. Had you’d ask me when I first started the draft chapter, I might have had a reason.
I once read that the parallel stories of Alexandra and Marie in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! were originally written as two separate novellas. At the same time I can imagine this to be true, I also assume Cather must have been surprised and pleased when she realized the two tales were meant to be together. My recent writing efforts have been the opposite of Cather’s. I begin with two topics in a single piece of writing and conclude that they would be better if kept apart.
Much of my difficulty with writing is age. At sixty-nine, my brain doesn’t work as efficiently as it once did. I am now more discerning with my writing than when I was in my thirties, and I finally have ample time to write – but those plusses are offset by the fact that everything takes so much longer. I do not exaggerate when I say that writing takes me five times longer now than it once did. This should not surprise me, as jogging a mile, emptying my bladder, and tying a fishhook onto the end of my line also take about five times longer. Retired people sometimes wonder how we used to fit jobs into our busy days. Partly it’s because we were faster back then.
Last week in his weekly New York Times editorial, Frank Bruni wrote about the importance of writing “gladly, quickly, and nimbly.” For me, only gladly still applies. Fortunately the joy of writing is enough to keep me going. I shouldn’t care how long a single book chapter or blog entry takes. To some extent, I shouldn’t even care whether it’s any good, although some of the joy comes from coming up with a good sentence or paragraph. I don’t feel the need to write, but now my mornings do not feel right unless I do.
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