Barely Writing

I barely write nowadays. Anything you can see in this blog that is posted for the last several months are only the product of my fervent desire to stay in shape. And all of them I wrote during those moments of desperation when I was in need of something to say just to avoid drowning in the state of inability to think. Thus they tend to be gibberish than saying something meaningful at all.

I can only attribute this sparse writing output on my deficiency to continuously read. I say my writing output is proportionate on how voraciously I read. The more I read, the tendency is that I can write more. But lately, I barely read at all.

There is even not one book that I totally consumed this past year (oh, okay, there’s Stainless Longganisa, but it’s really not to be counted at all). Right now, there is a slew of books that is begging for my attention and waiting to be read in its entirety: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which I dream of pulling out of it a novel someday; Jerry Oppenheimer’s Front Row, about the story of Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, and which was the prize I received from Read Magazine for contributing an essay; Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees; and Nick Joaquin’s Culture and History and The Woman Who Had Two Navels – the latter a re-reading after more than a decade of having read it during my college days.

With only this short list of books waiting for me to be read, I cannot help but realize how far I have gone sterile in stimulating my mind. And I cannot be surprised at all if I find myself not writing lately. What even gets my goad over my obvious wanton laziness is to read in another blogger’s site a long list of books he had read which I ever imagined I could read in a year; and it explains why his high writing output and adept use of the English language.

We can say then that reading is like fuel to cars which is writing. If one stops reading, it is inevitable that one cannot continually write. One will agonize on finding that he seems not to know how to write. And I’m experiencing it now.