Kill Your Friends

A longtime friend of mine, Seth W, wrote an e-book on killing your blog, a minimalist diatribe to encourage us to spend more time doing things rather than writing about them. This is coming from someone who has been blogging for nearly a decade and runs the Internet’s biggest metal sites (and who is singlehandedly responsible for most of my writing “career”).

Admittedly I felt above criticism because as a writer, writing is doing; there’s no further step to take if you’re a writer typing away into your blog, outlining your plot in Word, or scribbling down an interesting phrase. Even writing about writing — what I’m dong now — is still writing. The scribe’s pen stretches all across infinite regressions.

But there was a little window left open in my self-assurance, because sitting and thinking can sometimes only get you so far in writing fiction. There’s the minutia-sized event that just passes and can’t be chased after — that one thing that sparks inspiration. I’ve had it countless times: in the shower, walking from the bus to work, or thinking about the mechanics of blinking. If writers stop doing things we shut the door on the stray traces of inspiration that enable us to keep typing and pushing boundaries.

I don’t bold important parts of my posts and I don’t like analyzing the latest publishing trends or gimmicks, so as a writer I might not be the one to consult if you want to make it big in modern times. But I know that going off a ski jump and planting your self face-first into a pile of snow may do more to help your character development than reading yet another book on how to write effective dialogue.