Silence

It can be golden, or it can be awkward. Whichever way you look at it, silence is definitely reigning strong over my blog at the moment. I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's because there is other stuff going on in my life at the moment that mean I don't feel as much need to write things down in here as I did before. Or it could be that my blog is just the latest casualty in a long line of things that I start and then drop by the wayside as I move on to the next shiny new thing. Or it could be that other things have just taken up more room so I haven't had as much time to research, read and reflect on happiness type stuff. Or is it that there are things going on that actually I'm not quite ready to write about for whatever reason?

I don't know the answer.  I still have ideas about what to write about in here, but lacking in the inspiration to actually make it happen.

So rather than sit and stare at a virtual blank piece of paper any longer, I would just write about not writing to see if that helped at all, or unblocked anything.

It was actually an idea that sprang from some writing training I did at work the other week (my new work being something else I haven't written about, but then I never wrote about my old work either I suppose). Anyway, we had writing training and I loved it. It reminded me how much I love writing. Proper writing, with a pen and paper, not typing. Although I enjoy that too, in the write circumstances. Like now for example. I digress. Most of the writing training was focussed on 'free writing'. I have come across this concept before, mostly in the form of 'brain writing' as a brainstorming type technique, but never tried it in the way we did in the training. Basically we were given a series of prompts and had a set time to just write whatever came into our heads. The only rule was that the pen had to keep moving across the paper. No stopping to think, no going back and editing, just writing and moving forward.  If you got stuck, you could either write 'blah blah blah' until something else came into your head and out of your hand, or you could write about being stuck.

And so I come full circle. It gave me the idea to write about being stuck, sort of, on here.

As it turns out, starting out to write about being stuck has now actually led to writing about something I have rediscovered that makes me happy. Writing. Creative writing. I'm now going to start free writing as a daily practice. This is something the 'teacher' also suggested. The reason being it gets your creative juices flowing, allows you to muck about with metaphor and ideas and practice daily so your real written work (which there is a lot of in my job) becomes more fluent, more elegant as a result. She also talked about 'writing as thinking' which also really struck a chord with me. I hate that blank page feeling, but often I wont let myself commit pen to paper until I have a fully formed idea and know what I'm going to write. Daft she says. Where is the fun in that? Then the writing just becomes a chore because all of the fun bit and the creating and the thinking has been done. Instead use free writing as a way to eek out and form your thoughts. Often we dont know why we're stuck but free writing helps us to uncover what's really going on

So, here I am free writing, well typing at least, on my blog. I'm going to stick to her other rule and not read this back at all. I'm going to press 'publish' and then close the page down and walk away.

I wonder when I'll be back?