For whom and why do I write? HTML Giant recently had a post about this very question that I think is pretty intriguing.

There are many reasons I write. Writing is supposed to be this lonely, self-satisfying thing on some level, but I think we all, too some extent, write so that others will someday see our work. Even if we’re not actively trying to publish, we still want someone to connect with what we do.

NOTE: Sent out six poetry submissions over two days, and two short story submissions. Already received one rejection less than 48 hours after submitting.

Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Research shows that our memory is indeed affected by our overuse of Google as a means to obtaining or “remembering” items of information. Rather than having to know what we know, we can conveniently forget that we know something because it is too easy to access our laptops, iPhones, Droids, whatever, in search of instantly attaining any information we’ve lost.

My question has more to do with story “ideas.” Does Google, and its effects on memory (and, I assume, other higher functions of the creative brain), and my reliance – at times – on it to find images, interesting news stories, and other possible ideas for writing affect my ability to create? Has my creativity – my ability to brainstorm ideas and images and draw on life experience for inspiration – been negatively effected by this method of brainstorming? How does this Google-mining effect my ability to write?

I have been in a block for a few months. Perhaps this is one way of trying to answer the why of the lack of production.

Perhaps there’s no link between Google and creativity. Is it distraction? It occurs to me that with all this information at our fingertips, it is so much easier to be distracted by everything then it ever has been. Facebook, Twitter, movie trailers, YouTube, Amazon, sports scores, stumbling, new books, old books, that actor whose name I can’t remember. It’s hard not to return to that homepage of Facebook, the empty username and password fields beckoning, and dive back in, to be connected, to know everything that’s going on with everyone you know right now.

I’d be interested in knowing of other writers who have thought about this distraction or the effect Google has on the creative brain. What do you think about Google-mining and writer’s block? Is there something there? Or, am I talking myself out of writing? This all brings to mind a Jonathan Franzen quote about writing: “It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

Discuss.

I’m no old man. I’m on the quick slide to 30, the age at which, I’ve kind of decided, things change. Since I started taking my own writing seriously – I was about 26 – I was already aware of many authors who were my age or younger when they published their first, second, or later books. Ben Percy, for example, published The Language of Elk at 26 and had been published in The Paris Review and had won a Pushcart Prize. 26! Now, at 32, he has two more books – a novel and a short story collection – and a third out this fall. Tea Obreht published The Tiger’s Wife to superstar-making acclaim at only 25. Okay, so I started late and I’m not destined to become some hot new star of the literary world or anything, but my point is that – duh – age starts to catch up with a man.

Martha is certainly correct that many writers really hit their strides in the middle or late into their careers. Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer at 74. But. This age thing is certainly shadowing me, taunting me. If there’s potential to be realized, it’s better to find it now rather than later.

This is not all to say that I can’t write after I turn 30, that I can’t produce better stuff as I get older, but, certainly, I’m not getting any younger…

I have talked to a few people in Ph.D. programs in creative writing or who know of someone who has spent time in one. I don’t know that I’ve met anyone who says, “fuck yes, do a Ph.D.! It’s so great!” There’s always a bit of restraint in their voices, a bit of trepidation. You don’t get to write nearly as much as you want. You have to do too much literature and theory. Too much foreign language. Too much planning, teaching, stuff other than writing.

But. A Ph.D. is a better road to getting a teaching job than an MFA…but I still need a book. The book is the thing. You can’t do shit without a book in hand, on shelves. A novel. A former teacher told me not to even think about Ph.D.s, but to just get a real world job and pound away at a novel. A Ph.D. is a waste of time, she said.

It’s not that I really want to do a Ph.D., like it’s some burning need inside me, but it’s not as though I want to get a “real job,” either.

I have a lot to figure out this year.

Just in case you wonder, the schools I’m looking at are:

-Ohio

-Utah

-SUNY – Albany

-University of Nebraska – Lincoln

-Texas Tech

-Univ. of Wisconsin – Milwaukee

-Univ. of Illinois – Chicago

-Missouri

Too often I take those reasons and go with them and then complain that I’m not writing. I want to have drinks, I want to watch a movie, I want to do nothing. Too much of that nonsense. I don’t give myself enough reasons – enough incentive – to write. I feed the block with more and more bullshit reasons not to break out of the block. It’s easy.

Nancy’s post made me think, it made me say to myself, “hey, just write something regardless of whether you’re not feeling it or can’t come up with something viable to work from. It’s better than just not writing because you don’t have the inspiration.”

But, there it is. It’s always going to be the elephant in the room: writing. I allow myself not to do it because there’s a gratification – albeit one that ends up making me more angst-ridden in relation to it – in giving up on something that is hard.

It’s time to push through that, to really knock away at this block with a hammer, a big freakin’ sledgehammer…

That’s the mantra that runs through my head like a bullet slowly razing its way through brain matter. And, yet.

I haven’t been able to write in a couple months. Be it school, grading, a break-up, or self-imposed creative censure, my brain is not producing. This is an extended block, a crippling period of non-production.

This winter, I wrote like crazy. Six finished stories in 3 months.Maybe I need perpetual winter. Maybe I just need to shut the hell up and write, even if it’s garbage, garbage for a while.

Maybe I need to update this thing more often. Maybe the time between posts is some sort of unintended metaphor for my writing state.

Robert Olen Butler says you can’t write from “ideas,” that you have write from the place you dream, blah blah blah. True? I don’t know. What if that dream space is not really offering up anything in terms of ideas/images/scenes/settings? How do you emerge from this place of inactivity to a place of pure vibrancy, where words and sentences and good fiction explode from the brain, unabated?

Time to really start pounding away. I have been lazy about writing lately. I’m not quite convinced that what Robert Olen Butler says is true, that if you take three or more days off from writing, it’s like you’ve never written a word in your life. However, I have to return to the daily writing habit.

Also, if you haven’t already checked out the new Best American Short Stories 2010, do so. New Wells Tower story, new Tea Obreht, and lots of other great stuff.