top of page

August 11th, 2023 - A little less

I'm getting the feeling that I want to reduce the variety of what I'm doing with my writing. It's a common feeling.


I seem to go through cycles of adding new stuff on that I think I'll maintain, getting quickly bored or burnt out and then longing for a simpler life.


I watched a brill video from Nathaniel Drew the other day. He has this video series where he trials the daily rituals of famous artists and in this video he mirrored the routines of Vincent Van Gough. The man produced a new painting roughly every 36 hours so for Nathaniel that meant about 8 hours of work - in this case painting - each day.


Obviously that's not entirely feasible for me as I have a full time job to maintain, but the idea of that is very alluring when you're fed up with trying to maintain all these other areas. For instance, I love my short fiction blog - but there are times I regret committing to it. Maintaining a stream of content is hard. And it does remove some of the enjoyment of just reading and sharing in a more casual way. But I am glad that my blog exists because I know that as a short fiction reader, I would use it. And so you see I've managed to take myself full circle in the space of about 4 sentences to ditching the blog to saving the blog.


All the while this wanting to commit to simply writing fiction for long hours every day hangs over me. It's a common thread in my life - I am terrible at deciding what I want to spend my time doing. I want to be a doer of lots of things. Maybe instead of trying to do them all at once, I can do a little less at one time and focus on the long vision. Across a lifetime I can certainly do lots of variety, but right now in this moment and day I probably should do just one thing, and do it well. How to turn that into a practical reality?

bottom of page