Nothing to See Here; Kindly Move Along
Once upon a time, I used to keep paper journals where I wrote down everything I saw and thought. I spent long afternoons in pubs and cafes across Europe and Africa, nursing rationed cups of tea and writing down the minutiae of my twenty year old life. I have a box full of those journals stored unceremoniously in a cardboard box up in my parents’ crawl space.
I haven’t even looked at them in over a decade. I kind of cringe at the thought. Judging by the quality of the writing in my high school notebooks found this past summer when I was back home cleaning out my old room, some things are better left unread. I’ve toned down the hyperbole over the years. I think. I hope.
Those journals recorded all the ways in which my hopeful heart was broken (so many ways, my god!), the endless nature of overnight bus rides and the long slog to find affordable accommodation (dorm beds, sofas, floors, benches), the tedium of pretty much living off bread and cheese for weeks on end, the chronic bronchial infections from living in damp, crappy hostels, the minutiae of daily life, down to the last cup of tea and the doings of people whose names I have long since forgotten.
When I moved to Turkey in 2002, I started sending out mass emails detailing my new life in Central Anatolia- the staring, the mustaches, the evil eye, the stinky pastirma and sucuk, the Selcuk tombs found in empty car parks and in the middle of a traffic roundabout, the enormous bottles of strong, soapy cologne. These missives attempted to be funny (and maybe they were).
I omitted the heartbreak and tedium, as those weren’t interesting to people in my address book. Being nearly married off to the brother of a woman we met on the Ankara metro was.
The mass emails eventually mutated into my LiveJournal prototype blog, which had maybe 5 readers. Between 2004 and 2010, I shifted back to my old journaling tendencies and started writing down everything around me. Minutiae reigned. I updated it daily. There was often no subject line and no focus, no point, no tidy conclusion. Lots of descriptors. Lots of meandering sentences.
Looking back now, I’m happy to have a record of my Turkish daily life- it seems so far away now, as if it belonged to a whole other person.
The Livejournal writing faded away when I started up this site for my MatadorU course. I started to have topics: alleys of Shanghai, slow travel, learning Mandarin, doomed street chickens, genocidal tourism. My writing became more focused; the hyperbole and personal minutiae fell by the wayside. If I showed any emotion or gave away any personal information, it was tightly controlled and had a point to it.
This past September, when my semi-unemployment was confirmed, I had grand plans to write more. I was going to expand this blog, make it bigger, better, more. I was going to update it several times a week. I was going to write a book. I was going to be a writer.
That kind of didn’t happen.
I stopped writing, in fact. You may have noticed the dearth of updates. Once every few weeks, at best. Most of my writing has been over at Wok With Me, Baby, and that’s because it’s just so much easier to talk about chicken soup and cookies than it is to come up with an endless stream of thoughtful, concise, witty, well-controlled pieces on intelligent topics pertaining (even tangentially) to living in Shanghai. Mostly I just feel like I have absolutely nothing I have to say. Or want to say. Nothing I want to say out loud. Nothing I feel a need to share. Nothing I feel able to share.
Which is a problem, really.
This site lies fallow for weeks on end while I busy myself in my head with a bazillion incoherent thoughts. My Facebook page gets inundated with random photos of mops and bunnies and pithy captions while my actual writing falls by the wayside. It’s rather embarrassing.
I’m trying to figure out what to do with this site. I don’t want it to fade away, shedding readers and interest until it finds its way into the forgotten blog graveyard.
I’m also trying to figure out why my brain refuses to want to write this year, now that I have the free time. I couldn’t even complete my Nanowrimo this time. I just stopped. I had nothing to say. Where did my words go? Where did I go? What happened?
Sometimes I think this year wasn’t meant to be my year of writing, that this chunk of relatively free time was meant to be a silent retreat instead. I’ve been writing non-stop about everything, all the time, for decades now. Maybe I’m supposed to take this time to go back to bed with a cup of tea and say absolutely nothing about anything. It’s hard to say.
Any thoughts? Suggestions? Scoldings?
As you know, we are twinsies. Which explains why I have pretty much the same life story as you. Yes, I have a box of journals at my parent’s house that are so embarrassing that when I even get up the courage to look inside I blush. Yes, blush. I also had an early blog in which I just blathered on about everything and nothing and didn’t really feel a need to have a point or say anything thoughtful.
But then everything changed when I started taking my blog more seriously. While I like how my blog has progressed, it was becoming a big huge overwhelming task for me to actually write something with a point. Especially when I was chronically sick and busy and grading crappy research essays — how was I supposed to be able to have a point under those conditions?
I think starting my new blog series has really helped me. Because the whole focus is small, trivial things that I like about living in China, I get to be trivial. I don’t even need to have a point. it’s lovely!
I probably won’t give up entirely on my long, thinky posts… but for now it’s nice to take a little break from that.
So, umm, maybe a new blog series? Where you only get to focus on small stuff. Like mops.
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Indeed, you’re right- something small and simple might work. I had considered doing a new blog series, like my old 101 Things About Shanghai. Though I don’t really have 63 more things to say about Shanghai right now. I’d need a new angle. Maybe a daily mop photo. That would be weird though, wouldn’t it? Hmm.
I do like your new trivial things series. I kind of wish I was somewhere relatively new to me- I feel like I’ve said all I can about this city (at least all I want to say).
I also recommend getting your blog entirely redesigned so it’s so sparkly you want to play with it everyday. That’s totally working for me right now. 🙂
And I like the mops idea… weird, yes, but we like weird.
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I have a few spare mop pics and some lovely new ones of this year’s batch of hanging salted, preserved, flayed fish/eel/duck on our street (the New Year ones). Photo series time!
I have had many similar feelings lately. It’s just easier to post a bunch of pictures than try to write something more involved (especially when those rare posts are received poorly). In general, I feel like I want to write, but when it gets down to it, I just don’t feel like it. It can’t be forced though, you know?
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Indeed, it can’t be forced- and shouldn’t be forced if made public. I don’t want to put any half-assed, uninspired crap out there, just for the sake of it. Maybe a season of photos will ease the pressure…
Um, yes, a bit meta, maybe.
I’m not sure if I get the real meaning of your post quite right, particualrly that between the lines, of course (always hard to tell, all the more whith people you don’t know personally). However, I am sure to remember some of the umpteen occasions where I’d been stuck with writing for days, even weeks or months without the slightiest feeling that others would ever really want to read the result at the end. It so often all seems just not right, say sufficiently meaningful, important, sensitive, focussed, ordered, important…whatever. Anyway, in my case it’s mostly professional writing in pretty non-prose fields, and the details are hardly something I’d like or could afford to spread on Facebook or Twitter. 😉
Maybe one late night/early morning suggestion, just because you ask: What about, occasionally, stop writing about, well, yourself… in terms of not trying to show and explain your life and the things around you to the rest of the world, I mean? Please don’t get that wrong: I really love your post about (your) life in Shanghai, your cooking blog is most funny and your mop portraits are without any doubt groundbreaking pieces of documenting art (really!). It’s just that you shouldn’t try to hard to be more thoughtful, concise AND witty, let alone well-controlled, influencial or important. Because FEELING wasted, not concise enough, sometimes maybe even unimportant in a way… well, fortunately, that’s a big difference to actually being it! Besides, earnest and thoughtful writing instead of more spontaneous texts might as well become pretty soon a bit boring for some of your readers while it is maybe more interesting for yourself (trust me on that :-).
I think, compromising both it’s the ticket, and, in addition, writing good texts has not necessary anything to do with personally experience or going through all of what you write about. If you feel there’s currently nothing in your life that you want to go public AND/OR that may be of any interest for others (welcome in the club!)… well, why not write about anything else? … Maybe you could (i.e.) go ocasionally political (you are living in China, don’t you?) or you just go for the gossip, a bit of the judging and backbiting stuff… Or, if your life simply doesn’t feel particularly funny at times but you still want to write about it, just do it. The worst that can happen is that your readers will have to read some less funny stories. So what? That’s becomming more thoughtful for free and less witty absolutely doesn’t mean less interesting.
Just try – it’s your blog, after all!
(And now I really have to get some sleep. If you find some typos, please keep them for me until tomorrow… your tomorrow, of couse 🙂
You’re right, on many levels. I’ve often tried to detach my writing from my own experience but it never feels quite right. It often feels forced, cold, detached. I suppose I’m an egocentric, neurotic, self absorbed nerd in the end. I feel I’ve exhausted all I have to say about my tiny corner of this city (for now, at least) and, because I’m not going out every day to work, to teach, my world is somewhat smaller than it was before. The work I do now consists of either listening to people talk or reading what people have written. I don’t contribute much if anything to the dialogue. The parameters of experience and interaction are shrinking.
Expand my topics to politics or gossip? I dare not do the former, as I need to keep my residence permit intact 🙂 As for the latter, I have no gossip that i can legally share (my work gives me so many stories that I can’t divulge!). We’re heading to Thailand in a few weeks, so maybe that will give me that kick in the pants i need. And i’ll be shipped off to Fuzhou and Hangzhou for work before that- more fodder, perhaps.
The things that interest me tend to be in the details I share on Facebook or Twitter, and rarely do i feel a need to comment on them at length. Just snippets.
Must think. But not too much.
So, you think you’re an egocentric, neurotic, self absorbed nerd… like most of all the others who’re doing the bloggin’ thing in the web or exists in other ways on earth? Don’t know, but, if so, you’re pretty good at it… keep going, no problem. I’m sure many people actually like reading your oh so neurotic and nerdy snippets. Makes them feel less alone, and they surely also don’t bother whether it’s long meaningful text or short flashes. Beside that, I think posting pictures is also a kind of story telling…
And, yes, maybe better forget about going political, at least if it’s about Chinese politics. Not sure about the gossip; you may just make that ‘foreign gossip’…
By the way, in my experience, writing about things detached from yourself always feel a bit, well, detached because that’s exactly what they’re meant to be… Of course it’s more challenging to write stories about issues you don’t know by heart, things you didn’t experience as part of your daily life… But who ever said that it’s easy? It needs any inspiration and more time, also more concentration, maybe even a damned plan. But: Absolutely no need for excuses if you currently can’t manage/afford to get all of that!
Maybe you’re just in need for that vaccation (like so many others, i.e. me). And Thailand in January, that’s a pretty good region for relaxing AND gaining new inspiration. Have fun! :-))
Actually, I *hope* I’m not egocentric, neurotic or self absorbed– at least not more than the average person. Just not sure why it’s so uncomfortable writing objectively or outside of my own personal frame of reference. My limitations are embarrassing.
Am thinking I’ll go for the photo posts for now. Give my brain a rest…
My writing has been ca-ca lately. (Not that it was incredibly good to begin with, but I’ve had better days!) Even today, I’ll just make a bit of a comeback with a recipe.
Maybe you should just do what you feel like for now – enjoy what you DO have going for you, and don’t worry about having to update so much. Because when you come back, your writing will be as amazing and as funny as ever, and we’ll all be here, ready to read what you have to say. (Because good readers do happen to have the patience to wait around for the good writer to get her mojo back.) 🙂
Besides, it’s not like you’re not posting at all. I’m LOVING all of the delicious recipes on Wok With Me, Baby – and weren’t you just awesomely featured in a foodie-type magazine for it??
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Your writing will come back. 🙂
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I wonder if this is just a crap year for writers- a lot of people seem to be in a slump these days, unlike last year at this time. Strange.