I've been listening to a book called On Writing, by Stephen King. At the end of one of the chapters he gives a very prescient quote "Life isn't a support system for art. It's the other way around".

Holy shit. That's so true. Things happen, and we want to do other stuff. Our attention is pulled this way and that, constantly bombarded by the cool next thing, and what suffers is our art.

For most people, art only happens when we're excited about it, when there's some underlying motivation mechanism. For example, it's very common that people make a blog and their excitement about the whole thing propels them for the first weeks, months, or even years. But once the excitement splutters out, it's done. Dead. I know this is what happened to me. Many times I've felt that my blog is on some kind of life support, with me just refusing to let it go by adding pictures and cleaning up the site.

Another thing King's quote brings up is the crucial fact that we need to make space for it. It seems to say if you want to make art, then allow yourself to do it. However, making space is not as simple as that, as it goes contrary to our common impulse of just following the next thing that gives us satisfaction. It actually goes counter to either what is our nature as humans, or a deeply engrained cultural maxim.

I think another way to express this is how we need to get out of our own way. All the stuff we pile on top of ourselves is often too much, and all the overthinking, demotivation, and the well known impostor syndrome just make things harder than they need to be.

---

For the past few days I've been writing in my journal about my desire for picking up writing again but not really being sure where to start. I think part of the problem is that I'm aiming maybe too high? Not allowing myself to start small.

When I originally started my blog I literally didn't give a shit. I didn't care about what I wrote, I just cared about writing, about saying something, ANYTHING, no matter what it was. For a while this kept me going, writing mostly miscellaneous essays and whatnot, and only later did I start doing morning pages.

Morning pages... Beautiful in their own way, but they completely overhauled the way in which I write. I shifted to NOT doing dedicated essays but just writing random stuff in my journal, and if something nice came out, then that part would find its way into my blog with little to no editing.

But writing in a dedicated fashion is great. Writing with a goal is really hard for beginners, or at least it is for me. In morning pages, my content tends to be really rambly, going round and round. Every once in a while, a topic sticks for multiple paragraphs, and that's usually when it's something worth posting. However, I've always felt that training oneself to write about a single thing is crucial. Otherwise one has the situation that I'm in now, where I want to do stuff but I have no idea where to start or how to proceed. I can't count how many times I've Googled "how to get started with creative writing" in the past couple of months. I eventually desist when I find the answer is always "just start writing something".

In many ways, right now I'm in the perfect environment to work on my writing. Maybe that's why it cropped up? I'm on vacation, with good chunks of my evening free, and with energy. Especially in this current moment I'm in a very nice place, writing from a terrazza overlooking the center of Rome, with the Basilica of San Pietro clearly visible in the distance, arrayed in all its prettiest shades of sunset.

I'm not sure what I'm getting at. Not even sure if this will actually end up being a post on my blog—as I'm saying I want to write dedicated things but at the same time this is being created as part of my "morning pages". At the same time, why not... Though I have to admit that I've been writing a lot about writing and I don't like it that much. Why? I'm sure there's something I'm trying to express or talk myself into, but no amount of speaking is a substitute for action. Perhaps what I'm trying to do is to get so frustrated with it that I finally get off my metaphysical ass and do something about it!

What I do know is that I look back on those days of just posting for the hell of it with wistful envy.

~ 🌱