This Will Be My Year

It's just that there's so much. That's why I don't write anymore. Because my head is filled with song lyrics and TV dialogue and snippets I read in a book or on Facebook or someone else's blog. There are ideas flying around everywhere and none of them are mine. I was watching Torchwood this afternoon thinking "someone thought of this story. When did they have time to think of it? How have they been focused and disciplined enough to sit and write it all down, and then actually get something done with it." All this stuff that is in my head now, it's all been created by someone who got off their couch.

It used to be a special thing being a writer. But now everyone is a writer and even the most pointless bloggers have more of a point than I do because they are saying something, banal though it may be. And I'm just stuck. Because there is so much. And I don't know how to separate it anymore from my own thoughts.

For a while I thought it was because my well had run dry of adventures. I'm not traveling that much these days. No army or school (and right now not even a job) for me to talk about. But in the summer of 2007 I was in London for a week, and somehow I wasted it. I tried to write thoughts in a little notebook along the way, but I couldn't manage it and I tried to go back and remember so I could write about it after the fact. But I couldn't manage that either. It had gone. Lost in the noise of all the other thoughts.

So here I am trying to make a start again. With the new year comes the inevitable resolution though I never make a resolution out loud any more. I don't bother letting anyone know otherwise they could just wait and observe my failure. Sure a lot of other people fail too. It's cliche. Just another thing to be embarrassed about and to give up on and perhaps to start over the next year.

Dissapointed. I want to quote Morrissey here but I won't because it'll just become a habit. Or a crutch. But hang on, isn't that what we all do, we take others' ideas, let them influence us and then add on our own little bit? We acknowledge our influences and then continue on adding.

Okay so it's not just me. We all have these ideas swirling around us in the air all the time. We absorb some of them and we keep going. It just requires some filtering. So that's what I really want to attempt here. To filter through some of this stuff that's everywhere and try to weed bits out until I can actually hear my own voice.