From dark_mephi on flickr
I’ve never fashioned myself a writer growing up, but as of late I’ve found that I want nothing more than to sit at home and write about technology. Towards that end I have been working on my technology blog, The Far Side of Technology. Ultimately, I want to write professionally for the likes of Wired, Technology Review, and Ars Technica. I don’t think this is an entirely lofty dream, but it’s certainly something that seems a bit out of reach from my current perspective.
I’ve had a bit of success with my tech blog, but on the whole I find that I can’t keep a consistent flow of great topics. And since high quality tech blogs aren’t exactly a rare thing, I’m finding it more difficult to find a reason to keep moving towards this goal. Now practically every time I sit down to write the voices telling me that I have nothing original to say get louder.
I think this is what they refer to as writer’s block.
I’ve been struggling with a post for some time now. It’s something I think has the potential to be worthwhile, but it’s becoming nearly impossible to get the words out. This, even after I have what I believe to be a fairly good outline of the piece. I know the smart thing to do is to let the piece sit, work on other stuff, and then come back to it later. But even when I tried to do that the complete failure of the previous post kept me from moving creatively on anything else.
I usually like to surround myself with other creative works when I’m not feeling too fruitful, and it was in doing so that I ran across this recent column from one of my favorite life columnists, Salon’s Cary Tennis. I know many are critical of his often flowery but insubstantial advice, but I think he’s a phenomenal counselor in certain cases. He works best when he has a direct connection to the question being asked, and in this case it was a tortured artist who found it difficult dealing with rejection in his artistic pursuits.
While not entirely the same as my issue, this sort of anxiety hanging over his creative process is still certainly something I can identify with. This connection with the issue at hand helped Cary’s response resonate with me more so than usual:
I am a very critical person. This is a problem in my life. I have high expectations. If you are doing something and I am watching, I will have a different idea how you should do it, and I will take you apart and not even realize I am doing it until I have ruined your experience. Then I will apologize. I will say I was just trying to help. Then I will go deeper and admit I am a destructively critical person. So I have this. I am critical of you and I am also critical of me.
Now, I also have high expectations. I have experienced literature that opened the skies for me, that made the earth tremble, that proved the existence of a world right alongside ours, so far superior to ours that one might as well commit suicide. I have had these experiences with literature. So I expect a lot when I read. I have high expectations.
But that means I have high expectations for myself as well when I write. Every time I write I think I am required to make the skies open. I think I have to make the earth tremble. I think I have to reveal the existence of a dazzling universe quietly superseding our own, right next to us in another dimension.
That is of course impossible — as well as being destructive. Realistically speaking, maybe once in my life I’ll write something pretty good. Maybe twice.
I’m certainly guilty of Cary’s hypercritical nature as well. I’ve learned to control my being over-critical of others over the years through introspection and tons of awkward gaffes. But while I’ve learned to be more forgiving of others, I’ve made less progress towards being less critical of myself. I sometimes consider it a strength, but at times it can be debilitating — as evinced from my complete lack of blog output recently. Read More