Lately I’ve been having conversations – constantly ongoing inside my head, but occasionally with other people too – about whether to carry on trying to write when I can’t see any prospect of completing anything worth publishing; whether I should write ‘for myself’; and crucially, whether writing ‘makes me happy’ (whatever that means).
All I can say is that when it goes right it’s the greatest joy imaginable, but those times are so rare, is it really worth churning out sentence after sentence knowing that most of them are of no interest to anyone, not even me? I know the argument that if you don’t go through all the grunt work, you’ll never have a chance of finding the treasure, but on any given Monday morning, the pleasures of walking by the sea, listening to the radio, reading, crocheting, killer su doku-ing in a friendly café and untangling yarn (which I’ve been doing the last couple of weeks) are so much more immediate, accessible and reliable, why bother spending time and nervous energy on anything so risky and massively unproductive as writing?
I’ve been vaguely wondering about how many words I’ve written in my lifetime – starting with the years 2008 and 2009 where I wrote (and blogged) a minimum of 500 words every day – so for those two years I churned out over 365,000 words – I’m not sure how long I continued with that discipline of blogging, but I think it was consistent for at least another couple of years, and then there were the years 2000-2007 where I wrote a journal every day even if I wasn’t blogging, so when you add in the 200,000 words of the first draft of ‘Single to Sirkeci’, that will easily get us past the million word mark from 2000 to 2012 (ignoring anything I’ve written before or since then, including the 50,000 words of last year’s NaNoWriMo marathon).
Speaking of which, the one thing that demonstrated is that it’s perfectly possible to keep on churning out those words without ever generating a spark of anything which can be turned into the germ of a novel or short story or anything of interest. Does that matter? This is the question I started with, after all. Writing like this is the easiest thing in the world, but does it bring me joy or contentment for its own sake? When it comes to crochet or knitting or lino-printing or weaving or any other craft, I guess I’m happy to just keep doing it and shoving the results into cupboards and drawers and forgetting about them. I guess that my writing is the same. At some point I’ll be gone and all these files on my computer will be deleted too and no one will know or care what I wrote or thought or felt. And if I don’t write the words out, what then? They get reabsorbed into my head and maybe the underlying thoughts will come out another time in another form or maybe not. And really, what does it matter? Why should anyone care?