Publisher's Note

Hello everyone! After the Halloween comes Remembrance Day and now it’s barely 45 days when you get this issue and we will be looking forward to the holidays. As a publisher of this Filipino community paper, there have been growing pains getting into the role when I started in 2008. Now I realized how people come [...]
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Writing about Nothing

by Roger Encarnacion

It was funny, or should I say frustrating, how I felt a few days ago. You see, I wanted to write something that would be of interest to you. But I couldn’t. My mind was completely blank. The usual flow of words wasn’t there. And so as the hours painfully ticked away, I thought of the Seinfeldian approach to life, i.e. do nothing – and in my case, write about nothing.
It was Saturday morning, around 9:00 AM, when suddenly I felt the urge to write. Still clad in my pyjama, I went to my home office and turned my computer on. After adjusting the keyboard, I aimlessly stared at the blank screen facing me and listened to the monotonous humming sound of the mainframe.
For one and a half hours, I looked at that white screen, with my two hands clasped together under my chin. I yawned, ran my fingers over my thinning hair, and glanced at the outside world past my window. But no ideas came out of my brain. I threw a supplicating gaze at the ceiling like it was an altar and I was asking for a personal favour from the Almighty. But nothing happened. “I think I am getting old”.
Downstairs, I could hear my son slowly switching the TV channels, so much so that I could guess what program was on in every channel at that moment. CNN Live, a gardening show, a talk show, a lady begging for help on behalf of the poor kids in some third world country, an old movie, the baseball game, etc.
I looked at my monitor. It was still as blank as the summer sky on a late afternoon. I fidgeted, yawned, and stretched my arms, as I continued to search for ideas that were hard to come by. Meanwhile, the cursor at the top left corner of the monitor was madly blinking, as if coaxing me to make my move: “Come on, do something. Start writing…” But my brain was empty.
I closed my eyes. From outside my window I could hear the birds merrily chirping, unmindful of what was going on around them. The loud wailing of a lawnmower from my neighbour two houses away was starting to bother me. The droning, pulsating sound of the water sprinkler from my next door neighbour’s backyard was getting on my nerves. And to top it off, my stomach was starting to grumble.
The phone suddenly rang. It was so loud that I almost had a heart attack. “Enough”, I said as I sprang from my chair to check the kitchen for something to eat, forgetting to turn my computer off.
Now, I am beginning to doubt myself. What is happening? It was not very long ago that I could write as many articles as I wanted in a day. And modesty aside, sometimes I did it while playing chess and waiting for my opponent to make his move. It was so easy to write about anything. And the words were coming naturally and rapidly that sometimes I could not write fast enough to put all the words that were popping simultaneously into my brain.
It must be that when we stop doing the things we habitually do, we lose our touch for doing it. How true then is the maxim: Use it or lose it. We cannot expect a pianist who hasn’t played for a long time to just come up and play a musical masterpiece. We cannot expect a pair of dancers who haven’t danced for many years to still captivate the audience with their sharp moves and fascinating routine. The same is probably true for writers – more so if they are amateurs – who pursue writing once a month as a hobby. It should be difficult, if not impossible, for them to turn on the computer and start to write about anything in reckless abandon just like that.
So rejoice aspiring part-time writers. Stare at the computer screen. Close your eyes. Look up the ceiling. Munch chocolate candies and pistachio nuts. Sooner or later, it will come to you. And after many hours of painstaking search for ideas and catchy introductions to an article, you will be surprised that you have just written one.

Writing about Nothing

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