failure to write

The two types of writing I love most are short stories and travel writing. Travel writing I've done quite a bit of, and I'm rather happy with some of the results. If I had got a lucky break here (when I contacted the Guardian before going to Syria) or there (when I submitted the walk through Hama to a travel writing competition), I might be doing much more of it – and maybe getting something more tangible out of it than the pleasure of remembering good times and sharing them with friends.

On the other hand, my foray into short story writing has been utterly pathetic. When I started attending a semester-long creative writing course last year, I hoped it would open my mind to another world and set me on the path to fictional glory – or at least ability. But I was pretty much lost from the first moment, out of my depth, empty of making up anything. I started two stories whose fragmentary beginnings received a warm response during group critique, but I've been utterly incapable of taking them anywhere.

Tonight, when I should have been sleeping, I pondered the state of the world and a little chess puzzle and suddenly realized with absolute clarity why it is that I suck at fiction writing. My approach is flawed and the blog has to do with it.

This blog was started as a writing exercise. I believe that one's writing can be dramatically improved by dogged persistence. The blog was supposed to be self-inflicted pressure to learn by doing simply by having the feeble nagging of an empty sheet replaced with the reproachful glow of the date of the last post. One week and no activity? How is this a blog when there's nothing happening?

No matter the weak fictionalization – the obscuring of details, the deformation of chronology, the invention of incidents to drive a story, and the avoidance of names – the blog is me. It chronicles, with some artistic license, chosen aspects of my life. It is not entirely autobiographical, but it couldn't be much further from fiction.

What I realized tonight is that the difference between blogging and fiction is in the narrator. In fictionalized blogging, the writer imagines himself as the narrator, even if the story is told in the third person. In proper fiction, the writer imagines himself in the shoes of the narrator, even with a first person narrator. It's what would I do versus what would the character do. It's obvious which approach drives a story forward.

Until tonight, I was fully subscribed to the dictum that all fiction is autobiographical. It is true that there are often strong aspects of the author's biography in fictional writing, probably most of the time. But that doesn't necessarily make the writing autobiographical. A good writer fills the characters of a story with elements of his biography because that's what he knows best, but he is not the character.

In my blog, I'm always in character. I realize that this fictionalization thing has been nothing but a lame excuse. It lets me continue with a blog that does nothing for my fiction writing ambitions, an effort that, if anything, is detrimental to them by sucking my energies into a black hole of pointlessness.

To generate fiction, a writer has to leave the characters he has created. He has to let go of them lest they become a collection of surprisingly dull alter egos. The writer must stop imagining realities alternative to his own and start simply imagining, letting invented but convincing characters drive the story.

This blog's original purpose was to get me started as a writer, to get me comfortable with language, ideas and expression. It has done that, but I have long hit a wall. I'm not making any progress anymore. My blog has degenerated into little more than a vanity project, my fifteen minutes of fame twice a week. Even to myself, is just like any other blog.

Is it time to reclaim the blog – or abandon it for good?