Where Have All the Words Gone?

I haven’t blogged in a long time. Even before the most recent blog entry, my posts were scarcer and scarcer, with longer and longer stretches between posts. When I first started this blog, I started thinking of every activity and experience in blogging terms. How would I describe the experience? What would I tell and what would I leave out? How could I work in some humor or a unique turn of phrase? Which photos should I include? Now I'm hard-pressed to come up with even one entry.

I never thought I would run out of words. As a child of eight years old, I wrote many spontaneous short stories—detailed narratives with lots of dialogue that I seldom, if ever, finished. I dreamed of being the youngest published author ever. When I was 12 or 13, I started writing what I thought would be my first novel, a teenage romance that was actually a fictionalized version of my own personal fantasy. The female protagonist goes to California on vacation, meets her favorite television star backstage after attending the filming of his show. He’s smitten, calls her up, they start dating. Many cheesy romantic lines are spoken in the moonlight and on the beach. They encounter some heartbreak and angst later on, but you can guess how it ends. Or would have ended, had I finished it.  

In high school I often stayed up late writing spontaneous short stories and poetry, much of it expressing a darkness I didn’t really feel but thought I did—or should—just by virtue of being a teenager. I had a binder dedicated to my writing in which I kept a list of words that could be substituted for the word “said” and filled up journal after journal with a record of my doings. Some of my writing was even published in the school literary magazine.

As I went off to college and became an adult, I never thought of writing for a living but writing was always there, especially my journals. I could always think of something to write. I wrote a series of haiku about David Letterman during my junior year abroad in France. Of all the things to miss about my home country, he’s what I chose to wax eloquent (or silly) about. I started a short story senior year based on my work-study job shelving books in the reference room of the university’s library. (Another romance, this one tongue-in-cheek, in which the male love interest thinks the heroine’s thorough grasp of the Dewy Decimal System is irresistibly sexy.) 

Although I’ve never been called loquacious, with a pen in hand, it seemed I could always find something to say.

Fast-forward to now, when I let months pass by with no blog posts because I either can't think of what to write about or don't know how to write my ideas when they come. My efforts all feel trite. We creative types set such high standards for ourselves. I know what good writing looks like but I feel incapable of producing it, so instead I produce nothing. The girl who used to write in her journal constantly no longer knows how to tell her own story. The words, the words, where have they gone?

PS I think this entry sounds pathetic. It’s whiny. Who cares where the words have gone? Don’t we have bigger problems to focus on? (Yes, we do.) It’s so bad, I can’t even bring myself to post it. But it’s got me writing again and that’s a start.

PPS Because every blog entry is better with pictures, here’s a fun, windy selfie I took while in Scotland a few weeks ago. Yes, I know, I need to blog about that. Coming soon, I hope!