Resolution

Those of us who have so far survived are having, whether we wanted it or not, a new year and so, as is customary, I have resolved to do more writing, albeit several days late and somewhat reluctantly.

I don’t much like resolutions, but then I’m not very fond of ambition, either. On one side of the ledger is the column of hope, on the other the column of failure, and all that stands between them is the willingness to revise the definitions. For some, the natural salespeople of the world, that comes easily – they have no qualms about selling us dreams and find it pays to believe them already, even though they know the dreams they shovel would look more like lemons if we weren’t so susceptible to the sunk-cost fallacy. For others it’s a little more difficult but, given the social pressure to succeed, they’ll usually succumb before long, if only to the extent of inventing excuses.

So here are my excuses for why I won’t have done more writing.

1. It is difficult to measure writing, except by the blunt metric of words on a page, and that necessarily omits all the words I’ve deleted, replaced or thought better of. Less might be more, in other words, and who are you to judge?
   
2. Writing is not just the process of writing. For some (bar the authors of opinion columns, self-help books, press-releases and the suchlike) writing is also the process of thinking and, as there’s no way to quantify thinking, the counting of words or pages or hours cannot accurately reflect the amount of resolve expended.
   
3. Different people have different reasons for writing, and therefore different metrics. For me, writing is a way to express my thoughts, primarily for myself. Others might do their writing for money or fame or want of something better to do, as part of their work or to reinforce social connections or on the orders of a court. All of which might be perfectly valid, but we run the risk of counting apples as oranges, which isn’t satisfactory. Moreover, even if we all wrote to communicate our thoughts, imagining that they must be new to the world and not written down somewhere before, but unless we put in the time to check, which we certainly don’t have the time to do, an unknowable proportion of all our efforts are just a waste of everyone’s time, and should therefore be discounted.
   
4. There’s more than enough writing already. Even discounting the words we cannot read (those written in, say, Linear A, or carved in limestone that’s since happened to crumble), there are more books published in a month than most of us will read in a lifetime. Although each new year brings a cohort of (profitably naive) new readers, and the hard facts of the past must be constantly revised in the light (or sometimes darkness) of scientific or social change, the human condition really hasn’t changed very much, and there are only so many ways for an author to tell us that it remains beyond understanding.
   
5. Notwithstanding all of the above, nobody’s paid me to do any writing, and I already know what I think. Besides, my pencil broke, I lost my spectacles and a dog has eaten my notebook.