Thursday 18 May 2017

Writing - With Nothing to Say

It is day 28 into 30 consecutive days of writing and for the first time, I am not at all clear as to what I will write about.

Usually I look back on my day, or an event in the day that may have triggered a memory, an opinion or a thought and turned that in to some kind of article.

Today is different.

There seems to have been quite a number of small things that could trigger an article, but these would be forced whereas usually an idea comes easily.

I could talk about the new local anti cyclist hate group on Facebook and couple this with the discussion at work deriding cyclists, triggered by someone who has a niece who until recently was a member of a National Road Series team. To give her credit, the irony was not lost on her.

I could talk about someone I know who is on a work trip to a regional centre and panicking that anticipated torrential rain storms that may close the airport. This would mean an extended weekend stay in an area that for good reason, doesn’t exactly promote tourism as a local industry.

I could talk about the seemingly never ending pantomime that is unfolding under the disguise of the Trump Presidency, however there is nothing amusing about this.

My mind wanders to those who produce a piece of writing on a daily or semi daily basis and are compensated for doing so.

It would be easy for me to take one of my ‘half ideas’ and embellish it in to something that perhaps only I would know it isn’t.

There are checks and balances on the writers of hard facts, if only by way of the actual participants in the story they are writing.  

As I write, it occurs to me that I have a much higher level of scrutiny over the authenticity of what I produce. The scrutiny I have is, I will know if what I produce comes from the heart or from the brain, or a balance of both.

At the end of the article, I have to be able to look myself in the mirror.

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