The Long Road Back

So how do you turn a writer into a non-writer? How do you make a blog go silent?

One way is to get a dog. A puppy anyway. A big hulking chocolate lab puppy who drops toys onto your lap whenever you sit at the computer screen. A mass of energy who alternates between making you laugh and play and scream in frustration at yet another clandestine mission of destruction. That will slow a writer down in a hurry.

Or you ignore the laws of momentum until the snowball is rolling at uncontrollable speeds. One day of doing anything is nothing. But string two or three or four together, and the immutable laws of physics kick in, the gravitational pull hurtling your motivation downward at a steady increase of  9.86 meters per second. Make that six weeks worth of days and momentum, and you wake up and realize you don't have any idea how to reverse it. You want to, and you need to, but you forget how after so many days of just not writing.

You also start worrying about who your audience is and how to please them. You wonder who that audience is, and you forget that it never really mattered before. You start thinking about how to grow the audience. You become a marketer of that audience rather than a writer who needs none. And every time you want to write again, the doubting voice in the back of your head whispers, "Who really cares about this? Who would actually read this?"

You then want to make sure that whatever you write after an absence of writing is worthy of that absence. Finding nothing, the absence grows larger.

Worst of all, you fear that you really have nothing to say. And you realize that the reality is you probably don't. And you don't because you quit asking so many questions, quit viewing events as part of a larger story rather than an immediacy to be dealt with. You don't read as much and think as much and listen as much. You allow yourself to run near empty, believing that much activity is the same as good activity. You allow fatigue to produce fear and you call it rest. When there is nothing to say, there is no hunger to say it. The blinking cursor chastises. It is far easier to not having something to say away from the keyboard than it is right in front of it.

Then it just seems hard. Too hard. And it is hard. Momentum has made it so. You may want so badly to turn it all around, but every day of not writing, of waiting, has a price. That price is the feeling right now, the one making each clause seem impossible. That price is the long road back.

The long road back starts with a single post. Sometimes it starts with several single failed posts, or a handful of half-started ideas jotted on envelopes or paper scraps that sometimes make it to the table and sometimes don't. But those failures lead to something, eventually. Hopefully a small victory.

The first post is easier than the second. The second is probably easier than the third. But a third, and then a fourth, scratching those out when the renewed freshness is gone and the grind is back, those are the hurdles to getting momentum back in your favor. A mere relapse away from idleness becomes a rhythm. I seek the rhythm.

How does a writer become a non-writer? How does a marriage become distant? How does a prayerful life become prayerless? How does the disciplined diet become an extra 8-pound afterthought? For many reasons. Some of them good. But of more interest to me now is the long road back.