Breaking the Cycle
Lately, this blog has welcomed a steady plateau of daily readers. However, I wonder how many of these readers are repelled by the absence of personal voice. Too often, perhaps, quotations dominate my new posts, and if readers were seeking quotations, they’d likely look elsewhere. I haven’t written a personal post in some time, so today, I break the cycle:
Nothing frustrates me more than writing.
Something about writing bores me, bedevils me, and utterly exhausts me. Yet, for whatever reason, I just can’t stop putting words to paper. Some people have an obsessive penchant for composition, outputting thousands of words each day. But I’m not like that.
My love abides in the sound of language and the ideas behind a written word, rather than in composition itself. Currently, I’m toiling over a one-act play, two short stories, the sequel to Lady in White, and a small slew of poetry. I need variety to help soften the dolors of literary creation — a quasi-deistic, ex-nihilo act. But when a work finally reaches completion, the dolors endured become an almost narcotic satisfaction.
Poetry has provided a nice balance to fiction. When I was younger, particularly when I was composing Lady in White, my word choice was based more on feeling than on meaning. Struggling to capture the right emotional resonance, I at times fell into the trap of purple prose. Now, with a poetic outlet, I have a mushrooming collection of unpublished verse, and my fiction has become tighter, crisper, decidedly less purple. In many of my poems, however, the meaning still eludes me. Perhaps Garcia Lorca was right to call poetry anti-intellectual.
Nothing frustrates me more than writing.
Entasis 