Counsel: On Writing Blogs

 When you're on your way in to work in the morning, the landscape of the day steals across the splatter images of remembered night and occasionally in that interplay a light bulb clicks, don't trust that you will remember it when you get to your desk. Write it down right away.

When you are sitting in your office and I wanted to briefly write about things before you forget them, do it. Briefly. Notes.

When you have enough disparate notes to merit substance start interlacing them together through narrative or balletic poetics, don't worry if you're not-yet inspired. Write them together as best as you can, wrap a sentence around your thoughts as best as you can, build word bridges between the islands of your ideas. And when you inevitably stray away and get caught-up in an errant fact-finding mission, grousing about the derelict text mines and code mores of the interweb backwaters remember: you'll wind up with a lot of interesting points that still amount to nothing unless you put a personal touch to them. Internet surfing is a cheap thrill, and you won't find much of quality anywhere on the web that you can't manifold by yourself in the same timespan. Most of what we all (as web-denizens) say is flat and stupid. Find three points that warrant a second glance and take them down as notes. Look for the underlying theme that connects them before your foray turns out to be more trouble than it's worth.

When you find yourself stuck, summoned by a fresh page perhaps and left alone to hope and linger, do not be content to wait there and deny the painful inevitability that no muse of inspiration is going to come. Press on I say.

I like to practice my fair share of healthy skepticism and often find redoubt in the notion that by not writing anything all morning I will allow the clouded alleys of my mind to becalm and thus produce a line more terrifically splendid yet ere afternoon. Sadly, this is not how it works.

The blanks become large and horrible. All those blanks and your words atop them, so small, like a mole on the cheek of an albino, like ants on a sudsy white beach, black men in Nunavut...

One must hurdle the gaps of the mind with anapestic vocables if need be. Forget the resplendant anapestics clothing an exquisite phrase. Use thee pre-words, pathway quasi-verbs through the wildernesses of cabin syllables, stake nouns of reclamation that slowly form into intermittent sentence settlements until you find yourself with great sea paragraphs about to break over the shore. Let your words squeak out like little mice, infest the ripe white page like black rats in a maze, around the white walls and over them, spilling hither and fro, etching lines of the utmost severity and purpose across every lonely expanse of unwritten page.

Now it is lunchtime and you break away from your office for a bite to eat. The smell of food distracts you from your thoughts so much so that you become a new person. At the checkout line in the grocery store, tabloid secrets shout horrible gut-wrenching revelations to you that you do not wish to hear. When you return from your lunch break you type in your computer password and check your email.

That's enough work for now. Back to the blogging. What's this? Now your paragraphs are crowded! Like dark rooms without a lightswitch and you do not know the way out when you sit in the middle of one, you call for room service, (F7) thinking someone will come, but no one does, or if they do you cannot hear them arrive, so cluttered and stuff. Your story has become a tree and there is no soil for the seeds of your original idea to grow. It's roots, disordered and ablemished by ordure, a sprawling imbroglio and you am desperately lost.

Time to snip some branches. Edit. Cut that line about irritations. Excise your tangential justifications and excuses. Your ambition and pride hold those big words in their clutches, but your gut tells you that two little words'll do. They'll do fine. There, see, light?

Now, remember your audience. Are they gonna want to read this whole thing? Yes, good, great! If not then make some more cuts. Move the middle part up to give it some air. Put your best lines at the top. Prettify! Voila! Post! You are done! They'll love you!

And phenomenally it's only 2:30. Guess you better try doing some work today.