When it comes to writing, be it for business or for pleasure, I have a tendancy toward verbal diarrhoea. Though I may be more like the silent type in face-to-face conversations, when behind a keyboard I am someone who, while she may not have kissed the Blarney Stone, certainly gave it rather a heavy massage with her typing-fingers! (Is there an equivalent to the Blarney Stone for writers, I wonder?)
The trouble is that sometimes while I get lost in the enjoyment of feeling my fingers dance across the keyboard, the comforting “click-click” of the keys hypnotising me in an enticing rhythm, I’m not really writing much of importance or quality. Writing for writing’s sake. Writing to meet a word-count, or to meet a deadline. Or to bullshit my way into appearing like I have the faintest idea what I’m talking about (this one comes up in my work emails a lot!).
So, when it comes to participating in Every Damn Day in June, I’m a little bit torn. Some days, I just don’t feel like writing. Maybe I don’t have anything important or interesting to say. Maybe I’m run off my feet with the business of everyday life, and any creative juices have been relegated to the back-burner in the meantime. In the quest to write for the blog every day this month, there are going to be days where I’m completely dry. If I persist in making myself write on those days, am I just wasting my, and my potential readership’s, time?
It’s an interesting conundrum. Benjamin Franklin once said “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing”. How does one marry this with the well-known admonition to writers that we should aim to get at least a paragraph, or 100-words down each day? They don’t have to be Shakespeare’s sonnets, we’re assured, nor up there with the works of Kierkegaard, but just sitting down for 15 minutes or so and allowing words the opportunity to just drip onto a page (or, nowadays, a mobile phone, tablet or computer screen), may just be enough to let loose a tsunami that you didn’t even know was building. As essayist, novelist and playwrite A.B. Yehoshua once said, “the most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.”
Well, case in point this post, I guess. I had the sudden realisation that I had nothing prepared for today’s Every Damn Day in June entry, and thought I’d cheat a little and simply write a sentence or two telling you that I had nothing of consequence to say. (And of course it is arguable that anything I’ve written here is of any consequence! I would probably argue not 😉 ). However what I have managed to do, simply through the process of sitting down at my computer with a cup of tea and a packet of peanut M&Ms at my side, is to expand those one or two sentences to five paragraphs. Along the way, I have been introduced to a couple of very groovy quotes about the writing process that made me engage my brain for a little while. And hopefully you, lovely reader, will likewise find some small nugget to take away from my ramblings. At the very least, I won’t feel like too much of a fraud for posting it now!
Love, Jupiter x
Jupiter's Lair 
This is a post that I can definitely relate to and I think it paints the picture of the conflict that many of us face. Well, if not many of us, then I know that I face it. There are times that we either don’t feel like writing, or our days don’t allow us to write. While “they” say we should write something everyday, I do agree with your quote about not writing unless it is something worth writing.
That’s the problem I’m facing. I’ve gone back and read over everything I’ve written. And, in the effort of trying to make certain I had something (or multiple things) written each day, I feel I compromised myself in many ways. Now, Several of the pieces I’m like… “what the hell was I thinking?”
Anyway, well said, Jupiter.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks AC. Yes, this is the difficulty. I suppose if one is working on a long-term project, like a novel for instance, there’s at least time for frequent review and editing before publication. In that case I can see why having something down is better than nothing. But anything shorter term, it’s harder.
By the way, and for what it’s worth, I have been loving all of your pieces lately, so even IF you are compromising, it certainly doesn’t show 💖🌺
LikeLiked by 1 person