Tag: experiment

An Inspiration Block

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I accept they can often not be entirely relevant to what I have written of course but I still enjoy them. I have been procrastinating a little too much these last two days and this blog has felt like a chore. I stepped away from my computer about ten minutes ago after struggling with writers block and thought up a great title. I have subsequently forgotten it. It was really smart though and I was very happy with myself. It related to my inability to think of anything to write about and my inability to stop avoiding just writing.

This blog really is a journey. The initial excitement seems to have gone, as has the secondary excitement when I initially published my first piece after the first month. There have been some pieces I’ve been really happy with and some, I suspect like this, which I have just struggled through. I suggested a few weeks ago that I was looking forward to completing the year so I could just write two to three times a week but with quality. This idea tempts me. It is contrary to the initial challenge though and while I have written after midnight and I have regularly written more that the four hundred word limit, to stop writing a daily piece would challenge the very foundations of this blog. It is a challenge though but that is part of what this is as an experiment. Some days I will have only little time and others little idea, but then as I said I have written some pieces I’ve felt inspired by. These ups and downs are natural in anything of this kind of regularity, nobody can be interesting everyday.

There are possibilities that I need to crack back on with that discipline journey. Maybe it is just down to a lack of that. Certainly the fact I have spent the last hour looking at everything online but this blog, would suggest I have slipped slightly. I doubt I ever had the mental discipline to write something of well thought out quality daily but physically sitting down and just doing it never seemed too much stress. I must commend whoever has continued to read to this point, your dedication to struggle through to this point with me is commendable. It really has been a slog this evening and I still haven’t even thought up a title or looked at images to use. A sleeping man might do the trick for tonight. Maybe I should finish with a lullaby. Fuck it I’m off to bed.

This Blog

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

One thing I have noticed about this blog is that since I started publishing it and not continued keeping it a secret thing like the first month, I have stopped writing about the blog itself. The pieces now seem to be about topics; such as resolutions, Dublin, something political, and other things I can’t remember but certainly in the early days I was happy to write about how this beast itself was developing. Initially the point of the blog was to do an experiment and see whether I could write about something every day. So far I have managed that and it is something that the majority of the time doesn’t take up a disproportionate amount of effort. The articles are not necessarily of the highest calibre, or what I would like them to be, I suspect if I took longer or didn’t put a piece out daily, I could take more time and effort researching and forming something. Instead as is clear I seem to start with an idea and just go from there, which I also really enjoy as a format. I’ve mentioned before about the discipline to sit down each day and the mental discipline to put in effort to write something decent are separate things. Since publishing certainly the awareness of others reading has had an effect on this, but I think I am pushing myself slightly more; fully aware I could go further, which will evolve as time goes on.

What will also evolve though, and has as I said, is what I write about. As I mentioned already I’m not really putting out fluff pieces – although it could be argued this is one – even though it’s a perfectly legitimate topic it feels slightly self-indulgent. I see other blogs and they seem to be on particular issue, like travel, food, mindfulness or politics and I seem to drift into each of those areas when I feel like it. To attract people to this blog it would be good perhaps to focus on a particular area and subject to write about. However I’m not going to as I think that while it will evolve organically, the point is to see if I can write each day about something over writing about something each day, and there is a difference. Equally if it is an experiment to simply write, we corrupt ourselves the moment we worry more about numbers than the actual thing we’re doing. It may evolve organically in a certain direction which would be great and if after one year I am still writing and writing about a particular subject then the goal would be complete with a bonus thrown in.

So this blog is going to continue to be random and off the cuff. I would like it to improve, in the meantime though I’m happy; nothing is ever perfect so it is great that I can see improvement is necessary and hopefully make the effort to find it. It is even greater that I’m still here after what is probably about two months now and not got distracted and sacked it off.

Self-congratulatory piece…tick.

Well done me…prick.

Tomorrow

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

The challenge of an experiment or a learning experience, or whatever is best to describe my attempts at learning discipline and practising writing at the same time, is that there will be days when nothing really comes to mind about what to talk about. There is a list of things written down in a notebook somewhere, a notebook unfortunately out of reach in the next room, on various topics that could be worth writing about. This list was written down about six months ago though when the idea of writing this first arose and bar What would Henry Rollins do no other topic on the list comes to mind. That is however not the point because so far nothing that I have written about has been from any list or pre planned. That may be pretty obvious, mostly each piece seems off the cuff and I have preferred that to planning as seeing something evolve organically is enjoyable, and let’s be honest having a little ramble for four hundred words is far less effort than writing about a particular topic.

Do people enjoy reading a little ramble that’s the thing. There are plenty of blogs, opinion pieces or editorials in which if you look carefully it is pretty clear they’re not much other than a little ramble dressed up as serious journalism. Todays piece certainly doesn’t even reach those levels as it threatens to drift off to sleep in the gutters of nothingness but that doesn’t mean it’s existence has no value. We never know what is born out of any event, cause and effect if you will, it isn’t alway the moments which appear great that holds a true sense of enormity in a lasting sense. Sometimes things are born out of the most inconspicuous of events and this may just be one of them. It equally may not, that is for future us to discover. What is clear though is that if every moment has the possibility of creating something whose significance is not immediately obvious, then we should not dismiss any moment. Another way of putting that is that we could attempt to be conscious of all we do at all times. Be the Buddha, be enlightened he says, be human also but don’t dismiss something because on first glance it appears to hold no immediate value. Today though, the task of rambling with an obvious conclusion is complete, but we never know what tomorrow will bring.