There’s an old quote we editors love: “I’m sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”1
If I haven’t been blogging much these days, you can be sure it’s not for lack of subject matter. Regardless of what’s going on in my life, I always have something to say about it. The horses in my head are always pawing the ground, pacing the pen, eager to run. When the gate swings open, they’re off, tearing joyfully if heedlessly across my crazy brain terrain.
On the page this translates to semi-coherent stream-of-consciousness babbling — the raw stuff of genius flows fast and furious. But to fashion that into something worth reading is a horse of a different color. Every five minutes of writing takes half an hour of rewriting. (Trust me, I do this for a living.) And who has that kind of time, when there are all those old episodes of Heroes to get caught up on?
I don’t know why I feel that every blog post must be a tiny work of art. I don’t think it’s necessarily because I’m a “writer.” I have a non-writer, non-blogger friend who feels exactly the same way about writing e-mails home to mom: that each one must be a thoughtful meditation on Where He Is In His Life Right Now or its not worth the bandwidth. Blurg. No wonder Twitter is so popular.
What I do know is that despite my passion for expressing myself in words, it is often difficult. Babbling is easy; writing can be hard. And when so many other things are calling me — gardening, housework, exercise, Netflix — well, it’s all too easy to just drag the doc to the trash and go lose myself in Sylar’s eyebrows.
But. I’ve got a big but.
I don’t want to bin the Rib. She reminds me of the importance of being creative, even when it’s work. That the alternative, at least for me, is to die a slow, painful, corporate death from which not even the miraculous Claire Bennett could resurrect.
So I apologize in advance if the horses thunder by once and a while. Or even maybe a lot. The last season of Lost will be available on Netflix soon.
- Attributed to Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and Blaise Pascal. [↩]