Good At It

Once again, words won’t come. I mean I had a moment of clarity when doing my job of writing earlier in the week. This old thought was popping up where I try to put the writing into practice but nothing seems to flow. I thought “why am I even doing this?” and the answer was staring me in the face. Well, not really. What was staring me in the face was the cursor of a mostly blank Microsoft Word document, and come to think of it the cursor was actually blinking a lot so it’s fair to assume I won that contest.

The reason I do this – by which I mean write for my profession – is because I’m good at it. Seems weird consider how much I moan about not being able to do it but stick with me, my reasoning gets better and more self-aggrandising. What I’m actually good at doing is writing technically correctly.

I understand how grammar works. I understand how one sentence or paragraph should make sense in contextual relation to the one before or after it. I understand how to spell. All of these qualities make me better at writing than, say, the average berk who thumps out a comment below an online Daily Mail article or anyone who uses the word “hun” as a term of endearment.

What I’m not particularly good at is having that initial spark of an idea to get writing about. Let’s say somebody from some business somewhere needs a several-hundred word article on some topic with some basic points given as a start. I’ve already got the tools to get the whole thing sorted. All I really do is have a conversation with myself about how best to express all of this information in a logical and sensible manner. Then I type out the words to this conversation as it plays out inside my brain. Okay, I suppose “monologue” is a more accurate term than “conversation”, but you understand hat I mean. Context and that.

So when it come to these weekly self-imposed bits and bobs, I find it difficult to pluck a subject out of the air and produce some vaguely coherent word strings to make it look like I’m doing something with my life. Those are generally the times I start off by lamenting that the words won’t come naturally to me and ultimately spark some kind of internal ramble about some epiphany I had where I realised my life wasn’t total shit and does serve some kind of purpose.

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Perhaps I should’ve put this here last week instead. That said, at least I’m making up the numbers when it comes to new tunes I’ve become fond of listening to as they appear. I have to find fifty of these each year now. Why do I set myself such ridiculous arbitrary challenges?

Anyway, you can’t go wrong with a bit of Foos. It’s nice to see them back and making those kinds of songs that start off seemingly gentle and nice before plunging straight into something loud, frantic and “noice”. I’m feeling uninspired to generate more words here now, so I suppose it’s something of a blessing that the song pretty much just speaks for itself.

Foo Fighters – Run