Silence is Golden but Time is Short

It’s getting harder to find the time to write my blog. I started by writing every week. I decided that I’d do pieces with some meat – similar to the sort of pieces I do for publications – rather than just a paragraph. Now that I’m finding it hard to find the time to do them I wonder if I made the right decision.

Of course I can always change – adapt - which is what I probably will do but strangely enough it’s not the length of the blog that’s the problem. I think I would still have trouble if my blog was just a paragraph or even that stream of consciousness, just an-aside-sort-of-thing like a twitter.

Now there is something I definitely don’t have time for. Mostly because I’m not glued to my mobile phone. I am still trying hard not to rely on my mobile – I continue to do that old fashioned thing of using it just for emergencies, messages, appointments and liaising. I hardly ever use it unless use includes one of these.

This seems to be contrary to every other person under the age of thirty and almost every business body under the age of forty. The mobile phone is always there, in the car, on a quiet country walk, on holiday, at work, on the bus or in the train. We have all been bored and sometimes disbelieving about the “Hello, I’m on the train” conversation but this is now small beer.

One friend who travels regularly to work by train tells me that she is now privy to the lurid details of one of her fellow mobile phone toting passenger’s love life. The girl gets on her phone immediately she’s in the carriage and fills in her friends with all the details of her last passionate encounter. With sort of nitty gritty that would make a Lolita blush.

One would imagine that she would wait until somewhere private before baring all (!) but modesty, privacy and discretion seem to be defunct now we can speak to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Anyway, it seems the mobile phone is an extension of many an arm. It is positively scary that so many hardly seem capable of going anywhere without it. And I don’t want to go down that slippery path. And you know why? Because I love silence.

Silence: what bliss, no noise, a chance to think. I’m sure lots of people love silence but to do anything creative there’s just got to be some peace and quiet. Or, as the prodigal once said aged seven, ‘I need a piece of quiet’. Like many a child’s amusing malapropism it became a family phrase. Used whenever appropriate because, apart from the nostalgic sentimentality of it, it just happens to be right on the button.

I need a piece of quiet to work. There’s got to be room to think. There’s got to be big white spaces for ideas to pop up into. Silence is golden, golden. My ability to come up with fresh and original, deep or insightful ideas is impaired if I’m surrounded by chatter or clatter.

Apart from that commodity which is in such short supply it’s not the amount I aim to write for my blog that’s the stumbling block. It is simply the time to get the backside on the seat, time to get the mind in gear and time spent when I could be writing my book. And there’s the nub, or the rub in the words of the bard. Every minute writing my blog is time I could be writing my book.

When I started the blog I had finished my novel, it was about to be published in paperback, I still had things to do, talks to give, places to go all associated with it. So I thought a blog would be just the thing to keep my writing going. And that’s the trouble. It did, but it also stopped me starting the real thing.

And now I am into the book full swing. I still do design work so only have a limited ‘writing space’. Next time I write my blog I’ll explain how it’s going but at the moment, sorry, I just don’t have the time.

Lucy
www.lucyannwrites.blogspot.com

PS Hope you like the still and silent picture