Haven’t blogged for a while. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to write, why write, why share what I write.

I write almost every day and I know at least why I do that: it’s for myself, to get my thoughts in order, which is part of the process of generating new ideas and forms. Writing down ideas the struggle is often to express them clearly, and it’s in this struggle and I find myself expanding upon them, developing those thoughts and imagining new things. It gets the brain whirring, makes you feel alive.

Henry David Thoreau apologises for writing in the first person but then says: all writing is essentially in the first person. The writer is always writing from their own point of view. You can try to disguise it however you want.

Thoreau’s instruction to writers is: write your own truth, your own experience, your own thoughts. Every individual has their own unique perspective to share. What a waste to follow others, to write only what ideas seem acceptable to others, and let your own unique perspective be forgotten. You have something to say, so say it.

If you don’t feel like you have something to say then write anyway because it will emerge in the process of writing.

Perhaps I’m being too general assuming everyone can get it out by writing. But there are other ways to express yourself. The point is: don’t hide your truth; express yourself in whatever you do.

Perhaps I’m an idealist but I can’t help thinking if more people not only spoke their minds but actually did what was in their hearts instead of doing what they think their “duty” or what “common sense” dictates, or acting out of fear, then we might have built ourselves a better world by now and the latest news wouldn’t be every day that we’re once again on the brink of Armageddon.

Thoreau writes in the first person, but he doesn’t only write about himself. The book is really advice to the reader on how to live. Nevertheless it’s a personal work, because he has learned what he’s learned from his own experience. He writes about the “factitious cares and superfluously coarse labours” that make many lives a burden and he urges us to simplify our lives and free ourselves from those cares. The goal of life is to care for oneself and for other human beings, and that is often forgotten in the daily struggle.

I’m currently writing a story based on a tale in the One Thousand and One Nights. It’s about a woman who goes to sea and is blown off course to a strange shore, and ends up discovering a city where everyone has been turned into stone. The short version of the story is: she finds one survivor in the city who escaped the curse, falls in love with him, and persuades him to sail away with her and her crew. But the crew have by then piled the ship up with treasure from the cursed city, and are jealous of their share of the loot, and throw both the woman and the man overboard. The man drowns, while the woman is saved and, with the aid of the spirit who saved her, gets her revenge…

I think about this man who remained in a city filled with statues of the people of his past, alone for seven years with only memories and grim reminders of those memories, and I realise he must have been a writer. Most people would have left the city long before that ship arrived, to find living people to be around, but a writer can do a lot with memories and a bit of peace and quiet.

It’s not surprising that Thoreau has to remind himself and his like-minded readers how important is love for oneself and for one’s fellow human beings; the lonesome struggle can be so all-consuming that we forget why we were put here in the first place.

(I’ve been reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau.)