The blogger’s block

It has perhaps not escaped the notice of regular readers that my output on this blog has slowed down considerably these last two months or so. I am hoping it will pick up again after a while, and am, in the meantime, flattering my ego by picturing to myself whole armies of disappointed and disconsolate readers sighing stoically to themselves as yet another week passes without a new blog post.

Is there such a thing as a blogger’s block? If there is, I guess I’ve got it. It all started when someone asked me about Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a book I re-read last year, and I searched out the blog post I had writtenabout it. I read over that post, and thought to myself: “Oh my God – how utterly dreary!” I don’t mean the novel, of course: that’s a masterpiece. I mean the 2,000 word piece I dutifully wrote about it. Why did I do it? It’s not that I disagree with what I had written, but, rather, what I had written struck me as so utterly dull and unengaging: I really had nothing of any particular interest to say about the novel – nothing that any averagely perceptive reader could not easily have figured out for themselves. And frankly, it was tedious.

It is true that I have said often enough that I write this blog principally for myself, but, even so, I do make the effort to engage the reader: by making my writings public, I am effectively saying to the reader: “Despite all the many things online or off that you may like to spend your time reading, I am asking you to take a few minutes out to read this instead.” It is quite a presumptuous request to make, and the very least I could do to readers who accede to so unreasonable a request is to try not to bore them.

I think it was this experience of reading my old post that brought on my blogger’s block. When I started this blog, it was simply a case of “read a novel, write a post about it, move on to the next one”. But, after the shock of discovering how boring the resultant posts can turn out to be, I have now decided to ditch that: from now on, I decided, I was only going to write about books where I have some specific personal perspective to impart. I don’t mean scholarly insights: I do not have an academic background in literature, not having studied it formally since I left school, and I do not pretend to be in competition with accredited literary scholars. But, since each person is unique, each reader too must be unique too, and hence, I argued to myself, each reader must take in and process whatever they read in a unique manner. So if I could communicate my own unique taking-in and processing of what I read, that may be, at least, of some interest, if only for its uniqueness.

But re-reading my post on The Scarlet Letter, I found myself asking: “What if my unique perceptions aren’t particularly interesting?” Uniqueness in itself is not, after all, sufficient to engage the reader. So I decided there and then: if my thoughts on a novel are a bit … well, a bit boring, then it’s best not to write anything about it. This is why I wrote nothing about The Wings of the Dove and Madame Bovary, both of which I read in the latter part of last year: it’s not that I don’t think they are great masterpieces – they clearly are; and neither is it the case that I wasn’t affected by them. It’s just that my personal perspective on them didn’t strike me as particularly engaging.

And in any case, I plan to read fewer novels this year, and more poetry. It struck me recently that while I am reasonably well-read in the English novel, what I have read of English poetry is quite often no more than the Greatest Hits, as it were. I have, for instance, a fairly slim volume of the poems of Keats on my shelves. I have read the odes, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, that famous last sonnet, etc., but don’t claim to know them well (except “Ode to a Nightingale”, which I think I know by heart). I know I’ve read The Eve of St Agnes, and The Pot of Basil, but damned if I remember them. Works such as Hyperion, say, or Endymion, I haven’t read at all. In short, I can’t claim to know the works of Keats at all well. And we’re talking here of one of the towering figures of English literature.

So that’s it, I decided: in 2020, I shall read less fiction, and more poetry. And since this blog still claims to be mainly (though not wholly) a literary blog, I guess I should write about it as well. I don’t really know how to write about poetry, but I’m hoping I’ll learn with practice. For my first post of the year, I threw myself into the deep end, and tried to write something about Eliot’s The Four Quartets, but that turned out more a record of personal impressions than anything that could be mistaken for analysis. Maybe that’s the level I should keep it at. To start with, at least.

In the meantime, I would request readers please to bear with me for a while. I am hoping this block won’t last too long. And I am hoping also that, fairly shortly, I’ll be able to write about poetry without boring the reader.

(And, of course, to have occasional rants about things that annoy me: where would this blog be without a few good rants, after all?)

All the best for now, and see you soon!