ALAN ASHTON-SMITH

Lexical Exercise

In early January the back doors of the blogging sites are as crowded as gyms, full of people who will probably have fled from them before spring.  Despite the time of year at which I’m writing this, I feel entitled to pass such a remark, or at least to attempt some kind of self-justification.  That’s because I’m not strictly a new blogger – I created this site about a year and a half ago.  Admittedly, the only things I’ve posted here since then are links to things that I’ve written that are posted elsewhere, but I’d like to think that I still have some kind of edge over everyone else who resolved to start blogging in 2012.  If I may return to the metaphor of exercise, I’m not a gym virgin.  I’m someone who’s been a member of the gym for a while – it’s just that I haven’t lifted a lot of weights.  I may still have very little upper body strength and no stamina at all, but at least my trainers aren’t fresh out of the box.

So why the desire to start blogging in earnest now?  It’s not as though I’ve resolved to start writing, as that’s something I do quite a lot of already.  In the past three and a half years I’ve written around 90,000 words about Gypsy Punk music, which I’m currently attempting to whittle into a coherent PhD thesis.  I’ve also produced over a hundred short pieces of music journalism in the past year, and a handful of other writings, both academic and journalistic.  Although I don’t earn a living from it, and though I spend more time doing the stuff I do earn a living from, I think it’s reasonable for me to describe myself as a writer.

Hence the need for this blog: it’s so that I can move away from thinking of myself as a ‘PhD student’ or a ‘music journalist’ and perhaps become the kind of semi-mythical entity that’s known simply as ‘a writer’.  For such a being the act of writing is more important than the subject being addressed.  If that sounds like a defence for twaddling on and on without ever making a point, then bear with me: I’m not seeking a licence to write about nothing, but the capacity to write about anything.  I hope that by the summer of this year my PhD will be done and dusted, and I don’t want to finish that huge project and have nothing left to write about.

This blog is a kind of lexical exercise, then (see, that gym metaphor wasn’t just plucked from nowhere), and I’d like these blog posts to be comparable to physical workouts.  I’m a painfully slow writer: these three and a half paragraphs have taken me that best part of an hour.  It’s not that I struggle to remember how to spell words, or that I type with just one finger.  I agonise over word choices and spend too long wondering how to phrase sentences.  This kind of silliness needs to stop, and by writing regularly, and with the freedom to choose my subject matter, I hope that it will.  Striving for the ability to write 500 words of prose in under half an hour might be pretty feeble compared to pushing for the burn on the cross trainer, but consider my literary treadmill turned on nonetheless.