There are those who write well: may the gods preserve them and their writing. Then there's us lot, those who merely think they write well: may the gods preserve us too, but not our writing. May, the gods, in fact, demonstrate a rare moment of foreign policy when it comes to that, and send some emissary down from their shrouded celestial ranches to confiscate our pens.
Writing's not like singing: there's no X-Factor which rehabilitates the duff wordsmith as entertainment, as laughing stock. The general public can all have a good laugh at tone-deaf nobodies who think they sound like Pavarotti: but we who write poorly do it alone, without an audience, laughing or otherwise, and there's nobody to rescue us from our fantasy, which goes on.
The peculiar thing is the temporary suspension of critical faculties that permits this "I can write I can" nonsense. Today, for instance, I read back over the justly obscure blogs I'd posted to this site so far, and marked what a gap there was between how they sounded now and how they seemed as I was actually typing them, the same difference you might observe in a nice new juicy cut of meat on the day the butcher trimmed and wrapped it and how it looks, and smells, two weeks later, when you come back off holiday to find your fridge has broken. The trouble is that as I write I feel like the butcher, revelling in the gleam and sharpness of the cleaver I appear to be wielding, sure of my deft and fearless skill.
And nothing can stop it. Indeed, here I am, butchering again, slicing up the rank meat of my literary offerings into paragraphs, none of them fit for human consumption, all of them tough and leathery and tasteless. Come, maggots. Perhaps one day you'll put me off.
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