I’ve forgotten how to blog

I’ve been watching with horror these past few months as the world spirals out of control. Genocide is unfolding in front of our eyes. Old wars are continuing and new ones are starting up. Inequality is reaching new heights. Politicians are increasingly obedient to donors and disdainful of voters. Hate is on the rise. Climate change is ramping up. And the people who protest all of this are criminalised.

How do I even begin to write about all this in a way that contributes to progress rather than adding to the divisiveness? It seems to require a level of research and engagement that I just haven’t had the time and energy to complete.

I’m also grappling with the disconnect between the despair I feel at the world and the fact that on a personal level I’ve been enjoying my life lately. Regular readers will remember my post at the tail-end of a massive road trip around Australia last year. After that, we spent months exploring the scattered islands of the Pacific, and then went up through Papua New Guinea into southeast Asia. It was a wonderful trip, full of fascinating encounters with people and cultures I had little to no knowledge of before.

But the pace of the travel and the need to do writing and editing work to pay for it left little time even for my own creative writing, let alone blogging. And how could I write about all the injustice in the world in a spare ten minutes or half an hour in a hotel before falling asleep exhausted from a long day of travel?

In such an overstretched, time-poor, energy-deprived state, I could see the attraction of social media: a quick retweet here, a like there, a glib sentence to signal my outrage. Maybe that would have been better than nothing, but I’m increasingly of the belief that the brevity of our communication is a big contributor to the problems our societies are facing. I’ve never seen a tweet that changed my mind about a major issue, but I’ve seen plenty that confirmed and strengthened my existing beliefs. Dividing into camps and shouting slogans at each other in a toxic online marketplace run by a billionaire sociopath doesn’t seem useful at this point.

So I have been in a state of inertia, lacking the time and energy to write the posts I can see half-formed in my mind but not wanting to write a post about carefree travel, a good book I read lately, or the glacial progress of my career as a novelist. So I’ve been silent, which is probably the worst response of all.

This post is my way of breaking out of the inertia. It’s inadequate and self-indulgent—the very things I’ve been trying to avoid all this time—but it’s a marker I’m putting down. I will accept imperfection and just write what I can, when I can. Probably none of it will be an adequate response to the real task of our times, which is to fight for justice in a world lurching into barbarism, but I will put it out there anyway. I will try to write about the big issues, but I will also write about the small things: books, travel, observations on life. There’s a place for all of it.

As I write this, I’m remembering a post I wrote a few years ago about climate change, in which I asked: “What’s the appropriate response to the slow collective suicide of the human race?”

The answer that came out of that for me, thanks to the perceptive comments people left, was that the important thing was to take action, but also to accept that I can’t devote myself to fighting it 24/7. Next to huge, existential problems like the ones I mentioned at the start of my post, nothing seems enough. But we live, we worry and rejoice over small things, and just occasionally we shift the needle a little bit one way or the other on the big issues too.

So I will try to carve out time to record my thoughts on issues both big and small. I’ve been doing it here since 2007, and I’ve always found it helpful. I’ve already found this post helpful, even if nobody else does. I will also make time to read other people’s blogs because the sense of community has always been a big part of the draw of blogging for me. I’ve made some wonderful connections with people around the world, I’ve learned a lot from reading their ideas and book reviews and gardening updates and everything else. I’ve always liked grappling with big ideas, but there’s value in the small details of life too. I think I’d forgotten that for a while.

Image credit: By Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.