This blog is a ridiculous thing. It's stupid and worthless, in many people's eyes, a waste of time but not in mine. To me, it's the process of doing it that makes it worthwhile, and also the message to myself that I can and might reflect upon later when I look back, if I get the opportunity and the life to do it.
When I read ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’ by Haruki Murakami (a book that I totally recommend that you read), he talked about the life that he had, how he would write every single day, regardless of whether he would publish any of the things that he wrote.
That is what writers talk about, writers write, that's what they do for a job, bloggers blog, that's what they do, whether it's a job or not.
I never ever wrote this blog for anyone else other than me and some other people read it, and I am delighted about that and I get a huge thrill when people comment on it or send me messages about it (Even the horrible trolls), but sometimes it becomes almost impossible to write, sometimes I have nothing to say and that's bizarre because I have nothing to say to myself and then there's times I go somewhere and I lock myself in a room and I write a blog about something.
That's what Murakami taught me. You write regardless of what you're writing, you never stop, and you continue because that's what makes it valuable, and that's what makes it worthwhile, and that's what makes it cathartic.
When I saw Seth Godin in the flesh (one of my all-time heroes) and incidentally made a huge fool of myself, he gave gifts to the people who came, a couple of different things. One was a joiner’s pencil, a long flat pencil, not sharpened at either end, with the words ‘no such thing as writer's block’ printed on it. It's in my office; it's a thing of significance, and I must have looked at that 1000 times.
It's a metaphor for everything else, isn't it? When you stall and you can't work, and you can't initiate or you can't start, all you have to do is something. Just start and do something, and then it will build.
That's what writer's block is, that's how you get over writer's block, but of course, writer’s block isn’t just for writers, is it?
Blog Post Number - 4244
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