It's like running, writing. If you stop, you keep coming up with excuses for why you shouldn't start again. The longer you stay out, the less sense it makes to get back in. Your subconscious clamors for it though, whether you drown the voice with beer or stubborn disregard.
They quench something, both running and writing. It hits a spot that is not reachable by other means. If you want to satisfy the urge to write something, you must sit down to write it. If you want to feel the thrill of a completed run, you must put on the shoes and do the work. There is nothing like a runner's high or a writing high. Just as any drug-induced high is an inadequate and hollow version of a good runner's high, Twitter is merely a huff of Nitrous Oxide compared to the release a good writing session provides.
I have been lazy about both. For the purpose of this entry, let's focus on the writing.
I'm not counting, of course, the writing I do in my real career. Each day at work, I solve problems and fill holes and supplement existing content with better content, and make cuts and move stories around and essentially, I'm writing every day, with the help of a story department and editors and other producers. We are constantly writing, even if most days, it's simply replacing index cards on a bulletin board.
Nor am I counting the web pilot I've been working on. There has been plenty of writing and re-writing for that project, but it doesn't qualify as a brain dump. And I guess that's what I'm talking about: dumping out the stuff cluttering my brain.
Back when I tended to this blog the way I now tend to my Twitter account, I found great relief in writing the things trying to get out of my head. It allowed me to focus my thoughts and face my fears and express things otherwise vague and undeveloped. Ideas were forced to take form; fears were drawn out and slayed; memories were shared, and long held burdens released and resolved all because of what is essentially a public diary. It was a kind of therapy that I miss. I struggled with making personal anecdotes public, but I lived with the exhibitionist guilt to arrive at that place of clarity that sometimes comes after one of those writing sessions when your mind and fingers take over the keyboard; when the subconscious seizes it's window to become the conscious; when words flow like a fresh wound, healing as they escape.
No one reads blogs anymore. Not the way they used to. If I see a blog entry that's longer than a few scrolls down, I'm probably out. I simply don't have the interest I used to have in most of the blogs I used to read. I wonder if that makes me selfish.
I already hate this entry, but rather than kill it, I think I'll post it. Maybe I'll start writing as an exercise again. I miss being good at it.