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I notice that the hardest thing can be just deciding what to write about. It’s evident every time I sit down and open up this blog – although I’m writing more or less into a vacuum of ether-interwebs-space, and I can rant about any damn thing I please – I still hesitate to actually pick a topic.

It’s not that I can’t think of something to say as I have too much to say. Fuck, I could blog about my breakfast (people have made a whole art project out of it) I could go on and on about Berlin, the creative process, the random things I contemplate and which seem so funny to me, as told by myself. I talk to myself a lot; there’s no shortage of conversation material.

But writing it down is hard. Writing is hard, is the basic conclusion I have come to. Or as someone else once put it: “Writing is easy. You just stare at the paper until blood comes out.”

This morning I was reading a magazine and drinking coffee. I thought about how tactile magazines were, and how much I preferred them to internet news. How screens put an automatic speed filter on your brain (“I must absorb this as quickly as possible before moving onto the next thing”) which physical objects made out of paper don’t seem to.

I read a story about a drone strike, and had a little niglet of an idea – the kind of ‘what if’ that often kickstarts fiction. I jotted something down. Then I read the end of the article, and discovered that someone had already written some fiction to that effect. Boo. Enthusiasm summarily deflated, even though the idea could be bent many ways and fiction is as unique as your storytelling voice.

The point is there are lots of ideas. And there are lots of ways to lose your enthusiasm (thinking about an audience is one, judging your idea before it’s hatched is another). A creative practice involves, I am convinced, spending time every day throwing spaghetti at the wall. It might stick. You might just make a mess and waste some time.

Here’s some spaghetti.