PRIDE COMES BEFORE A FALL

Why is it that whenever I’m feeling quite pleased with or, dare I say it (yes, I dare…) proud of a piece of writing, that seems to be the one piece that nobody ever seems to read? Is it really such a basic truth that any feelings of so-called “pride” that I manifest, even to myself, must inevitably be followed by the “fall” of even my more regular visitors failing to notice it and it never getting actually read by anyone other than myself?

The process of writing anything is such a thankless thing to be doing most of the time anyway. You sit alone in a room trying to squeeze the sponge of your mind to come up with something new and original to say, and then you string a few words together, read them back to yourself, tinker with them for a while, worry about what anybody might think you actually mean by them, and then think “Oh what the hell? I’ve written it now, so I obviously thought it at some point…” and click the “publish and be damned” button and go away and hide in a corner to await the inevitable indifference. I don’t claim that I could possibly know what’s going on in the heads of anyone else who spends time doing such things, but, for me, there’s precious little in the way of actual “pride” in it, more the sort of inevitability of an accident waiting to happen, even though, unfairly as it may sometimes seem, the corresponding “fall” part can seem unfairly huge in comparison.

Because the actual “fall” itself is always self-inflicted. The problem generally is twofold. The first is the obvious one and is the every day one of “Why on Earth do you think anyone should be interested in anything you have to say?” With me, that’s such a given that I should no longer need to expand upon it further any more. The second is much, much trickier. Sometimes, amidst all of the usual dreck, you actually do manage to convince yourself that something you’ve put together is actually worthwhile and, even if you say it yourself, you are pretty pleased with it. In fact you can sometimes be so pleased with it that you can hardly wait to publish it and put it out there so that someone else can enjoy it too. You can too easily convince yourself that “people are actually going to enjoy this…” which is obviously the “pride” part, and sometimes even if you truly believe that “that was the best thing that I’ve ever written” (not this one, obviously).

I have, on occasion, been so very pleased about a piece that I’ve whored it around and flogged that particular dead horse like a crazy person to get it more attention, but such madness rarely works. Then, naturally, the world then goes “Meh!” but instead takes more notice of something that you thought was actually a bit rubbish but you simply put out there because you didn’t have anything else prepared that day, which is where the “fall” part occurs. Sometimes you feel so disappointed even when the expectations were only of your own making. “Lower your expectations and you’ll be a lot happier” as a wise man once told me, although I sometimes wish that I’d acted on his words instead of thinking that I knew better.

Like with television ratings, “quality” is seldom defined by the number of people actually watching, but “popularity” is. Here in Lesser Blogfordshire, if  “best” was defined as “the piece most looked at” then my little spoof interview with Professor Brian Cox was one of the best things I’ve ever written, and I’m not convinced that it was. Sometimes you find out that whatever it is that you have written has only been “skimmed through” anyway, just, I suppose to check whether it was something of genuine interest. Like when one of my friends was recently asked a question about one of his pieces that had actually been answered quite poignantly within the body of the piece itself. Somehow I could even feel the ripples of disappointment expanding across the murky pond of the web from here.

There are probably millions of sad little puppies like myself rattling out our nonsense most days in order to achieve… well, what, exactly? For myself, most of the time it just seems to satisfy an obligation that I have only made to myself and that only I actually seem to care about. Other times it’s just like I’m trying to open a tap in my mind to relieve the pressure building up from the cascading waterfall of words that is building up inside there. Many other amateur wordsmiths have a plan, or just write about one specific thing that they ‘like” or “enjoy” (a couple of rather alien concepts there, I feel…), whereas the eclectic mix of pointless rhetoric that rattles out of me, seemingly with so little thought (although you’d be quite wrong about that), just appears to be from wherever the mood takes me at the time. Every morning we open up life’s box of chocolates only to find that someone’s nabbed all the soft centres and left we with a hard caramel to chew over.

Sometimes the voices of doubt in your head can take a darker turn and you can convince yourself completely that it’s not as if anyone is going to really notice and who really cares if one more voice has a few thoughts on any given subject. After all, hasn’t everyone? If they want to read stuff like that they’ll go out and buy a newspaper written by real writers, thank you very much. Even I am sometimes massively self-deprecating. “What were you doing?” I’ll be asked, and I’ll reply with something along the lines of “I was composing some of my so-called “literary masterpieces”. It keeps me amused anyway…”

“By the time you strike “publish” you will have denied me three times!”

You see, the blog speaks to me on occasion, even when I’m engrossed in something else entirely it can summon me to the keyboard and demand that I feed it. Sometimes it’s just a few crumbs scribbled onto scraps of paper that I’ll sir into a recipe later. Other times things just pour out of me almost complete and I have to head to the keyboard before they vanish at the speed of thought. We have a peculiar relationship. I sometimes wonder whether it’s a bit like Anthony Hopkins and his ventriloquist’s dummy in “Magic” and it’s no longer my voice that’s speaking at all, but then I realise that such transference isn’t going to persuade the cleverer people amongst you that I’m not responsible for my own ridiculous and inept output.

Still, it was worth a try…

There are, of course “good” and “real” writers who actually do this as a job, and sometimes it seems so effortless to them, although I’m sure that it isn’t, and the results are so breathtaking that the rest of us can only watch and admire in wonder as their talent roars past us in the fast lane as we stand in the gutter, holding our cardboard sign up, hoping for a lift to the next crossroads. That said, I am utterly convinced that if I had to make a living out of word-wrangling, I would fail dismally and the simple fact of having to do it would probably take all the fun out of it.

Instead I spend my free time at the roadside, here in Lesser Blogfordshire, “Where the fun never starts…”