No blogs please, we're writers - Nick Green

Writing as a writer (is there any other way?) I sometimes feel an irksome dissatisfaction that I’m just not getting enough. Enough exposure, if you know what I mean. I feel I should be, well, putting it out there a bit more than I do.

I made the mistake of reading some statistics online. Apparently, most people in my peer group are managing it around two to three times a week. Some even more. A few energetic, dedicated souls are getting down to it every single day, for far longer and with more satisfying results (you can tell by the number of comments they get).

But I’m among the growing number who find that they’re just too tired at the end of the day, or too busy, or just too disillusioned with the working relationship, to bare our souls on the internet very often. No, once a month is about as often as I can manage to write a blog post.

There you were talking about sex, I thought you were talking about holidays. WALKS! I mean walks.

Blogging can be an uncomfortably intimate activity for a writer, especially one who considers that some things are best kept private. Writing fiction is a different matter – there you have some protection, an impermeable layer (if you will) between you and the reader, a sort of membrane of artificiality that means they can’t accidentally conceive the wrong ideas about you. Of course I don’t condone dishonesty in writing, I just mean that fiction is the safest way to do it.

The pressure of blogging can mean it’s sometimes hard to rise to the occasion at all. I’ve tried to practise by writing a journal in my notepad, but after a while that just felt self-indulgent (and also brings on terrible cramp in my right hand). I’m not really much of a talker, you see – I just finish my daily word count and then go straight to sleep.

And then there’s trying to limit my screen time to sensible levels. I’ve read other cautionary tales – apparently Chaucer wrote so much that he ended up going blind. Also, if I’m at a party and mention that I’m a writer, it can cause pregnant silences and even embarrassment. Writing’s fine and natural, we’re told, but maybe if we could find a quiet corner in which to do it, then people wouldn’t be so uncomfortable. I think we can all agree that there’s nothing worse than ostentatious writing.

So yes – even though we’re constantly being encouraged to keep up with the Joneses, to do it more and more and sow our wild words as far and wide as we can, if we’re ever to gain credibility in the writing world – I think I’ll stick to my once-a-month blog. It’s not that I don’t have enough ideas… it’s just that they don’t all come at once.