Is it possible to write too much? I remember asking a famous scholar once about something he had written. He couldn’t remember it. In his defense he said, “You know, you write so much.”
I’m not a young man, and I think I’m finally starting to see what he meant. In addition to this blog, I write another under my actual name. I’ve been doing for about six years. The other day I recalled a somewhat funny thing I’d written (or so it seemed to me) but I couldn’t find it.
I tried searching the blog with every possible keyword I could imagine. Nothing helped. I couldn’t remember what I was writing about, or even the exact wording of the phrase. It was a powerful image, though, and I wanted to find it. Even in these days of “lasers in the jungle” you can’t find a phrase when you need to.
Maybe the problem is I write too much. I write every day. I pretty much have since I was a teenager. My advice to younger writers is always the same: write every day. Even if it’s only for fifteen minutes. It is the daily practice that you need.
On a rare day off work I can write thousands of words a day. Most days it’s only about a hundred or two. Still, the important thing is to do it. Like a musician, or a farmer, a writer can’t take a day off.
My ideal vacation, should I ever get to choose, would be an isolated cabin with reams of paper and buckets of pens. I’d like to spend an isolated week with my own thoughts. Or a month. Or a year.
We writers live in our own heads. I need other people, of course. Without them there’s not much to write about. Still, I need that time to spend alone with my ideas.
Maybe, however, I indulge myself too much. I have folders, discs, and cloud space full of words and I can’t even find the ones I wrote for a particular occasion. All I can say is that this will be a mess to sort through when I’m gone.
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