Twaddle

Katherine Mansfield from www.macleans.school.nz

Thanks so much to everyone who commented on the post below. One of the lies that blocks like this tell you is that you are the only one who has ever experienced it. Naming the beast on the blog, and the response, has been such a relief and I am very grateful.

Up until a few years ago, when its spine broke and pages started to fall out and I had to throw it away, one of the most re-read books in my collection was Katherine Mansfield's Letters and Journals. I can't remember why I bought it, I had never read any of her short stories, but I was captured from the first page.

A New Zealander born in 1888 and living in London in the early part of the twentieth century, a friend of D H Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield instinctively understood the importance of the everyday : books and writing, her husband, her cats (which she adored), flowers, other people (she could be remarkably funny and sometimes bitchy on occasions, which adds to the interest), her travels, the countryside, dealing with her own illness.

She had an anguished relationship with her father, a wealthy banker, whom she felt didn't approve of her lifestyle. There was a failed first marriage and several affairs. She loved her second husband and eventual publisher, John Middleton Murry, but spent many months away from him towards the end of her life trying to find a cure for the tuberculosis that eventually killed her in her thirties. And she wrote about it all - her daily life - in her journals and in her letters to friends. She wrote, too, beautifully judged short stories about people and their seemingly mundane lives. No question about it, she would have been a blogger par excellence.

And thinking about this makes me question why I am being so critical about my own writing at the moment. I've half a dozen posts in the Drafts folder, it's not that I can't write, I just can't press the Publish Post button and I'm far too adept at pressing Delete. Too self-absorbed, my Inner Critic says, you can't write as well as X (insert the name of any blogger here), it's not intellectual or deep enough, too superficial, you can't post that, in fact why don't you just stop blogging altogether ...

Katherine Mansfield celebrated the value of writing about the so-called ordinary. As do the bloggers I admire. Not all of the latter turn out deathless prose with every post. But they trust their own truth, whatever it is on that day, and they press the Publish Post button. They take the leap of faith and it works.

I'd actually forgotten about Katherine until yesterday when I was googling for something, some words of wisdom, that would provide a solution to how I was feeling about my writing. The search engine threw up this quotation of hers which I think is just wonderful and a great mantra for bloggers like me who take themselves far too seriously:

Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything than nothing at all.

I'm considering renaming the blog. Twaddle? A Breath of Twaddle?