I am getting nervous, more nervous, in fact, than my normally nervous self.
We are 10 days into 2020, and the only new thing I have managed to write has been a limerick about a worm named Joe. It was quite an earth-shattering little treatise, I will admit, but it wasn’t Gone With the Wind.
I should correct myself at this point. I have actually written a number of new things during the first one-third of this first month of the new year, but they are none of them completed and it is doubtful you will ever see any of them. I know what the problem is with each of those pieces. They were forced. I was bored writing them and I have discovered that if I am bored writing a thing, you will be bored reading it. If you read something of mine that was fun to read, that is because I had fun writing it.
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I haven’t surveyed every creative writer in the world to see if they share this experience, but I think it is commonly known as a dry spell. This is a term that comes from farming and I was well aware of dry spells on the farm. They would threaten crops and put worry lines on farmers’ faces. But then, a cloudburst came, and all was right with the world again. In fact, sometimes too much rain would fall and crops would get partially washed away. But that was rare.
During a writing dry spell, a writer such as I am, begins to worry that he will never experience another cloudburst again. He has written his last good thing. That is not a happy prospect.
But then one day, there it is again, whatever that little word fairy might happen to be. And the stories, poems, limericks, all come in bunches until you get tired of writing them down. But that’s OK. You’ll take it. And soon, all thought of dry spells are gone.
Until the next one.
©2020 Jim Hagarty
