On Having Nothing To Say

I’ve had nothing to say, so I’ve been choosing to say nothing. I suppose it’s an odd position for any blogger to be in. It seems to me that so many blogs exist precisely because people who have nothing to say want to say something. It’s why we end up reading the mundane details of their lives.

So my silence is different. I’m silent because I’m not in the mood to entertain you. Life is difficult. It’s coming up to Christmas and it’s a struggle to sustain my indifference to the outside world. I don’t really know what’s wrong with me. Desperation, fatigue, a seasonal shift in my moods…

There is, however, a terrible inevitability of a blog dying. You begin with high expectations and work hard to establish a readership. The readership begins to dribble in. Then, one day, you get noticed. You have a peak when there are hundreds of people hanging around the blog and leaving messages. It lasts for about 48 hours and then all your new friends are gone. You’re back working at the coal face for a few loyal visitors, in whom you begin to feel a ridiculous pride. From therein, you’re lucky if you attract one new regular reader a week.

Then, at some point, you begin to wonder ‘why’. That happened to me the other day. The Harlan Ellison piece I found on Why That’s Delightful made me realise that in all the few years I’ve been publishing my work to the web, I’ve written close to 500,000 words and that it has earned me nothing. Nada. Zilch. What a fool I've been!

After half a million words, I think the shine of blogging has finally begun to wear thin.

I don’t know why this blog has failed to take off. Perhaps it’s simply because it’s not funny enough. Perhaps I’m simply not a good enough writer. I might lack interesting things to say. What entertains me, clearly doesn’t entertain the masses. I’m not a political blogger, so people don’t come here for informed gossip about the Home Office or Westminster. Nor am I a ‘personal’ blogger who people get to know as if they are getting to know a friend. If it doesn’t sound too conceited, I consider myself a ‘humourist’, though today lacking the humour. I write about nonsensical things. I write to amuse myself. I write to make you laugh.

All of this is a way of saying that the readership is just getting nowhere fast. I also don’t know if it’s just me or whether this is a wider phenomena, but traffic has been down for the last month. One of the rules of blogging is supposedly not caring about readership. Yet I do. If I don’t get readers, I begin to think that I should move on. I should write something more meaningful for myself. They say writers earn £4000 a year. What riches! How do I get some of that action?

And yet…

Yet, I’d miss the feedback. I’d miss the hits. I’m miss the comments, the trackbacks, the incoming links. I’d miss the excitement of writing these short pieces that I write to amuse myself and which send to bed at night chuckling to myself. I’d also miss thinking that I’ve made somebody I don’t know laugh.

And yet…

I can’t help but feel that I’ve half a million words for very little purpose. I have another novel half finished but blogging gets in the way when I could have it done in a month or two.

And yet...