The Duck is Broken

After aeons of thinking about beginning a blog, and never quite possessing the enthusiasm to actually go about doing so, I now find myself sat in front of the screen writing a post about writing my first post. This kind of conversation with/to myself is perhaps an inevitable part of the blogging process, but hopefully subsequent posts will have a little more substance.

Although, the writing about writing does lead me to wonder about the nature of filling the blank page. Even without having much to say (sat in the office feeling highly demotivated on the last day of term) the sight of the newly-established blog devoid of content made me anxious to write. This is the absolute opposite of the writing anxieties of Phd research, where the blank page is already always overburdened, or overdetermined for you theorists out there, by the gargantuan reserves of notes and preparatory reading. Why is it that there can be no happy medium between the two dichotomous aspects of research, the reading and the writing? I can never clearly and confidently reach a stage where I feel that the reading has been done, and the writing can begin, meaning that when pragmatic concerns such as deadlines or supervisory pressure rear their head, the writing must be birthed from the overly-fecund store of thoughts and notes.

Perhaps the solution is to redefine the peramaters of the problem (if that isn't too much of a cop-out) and attempt to deconstruct the binary oppositon of reading and writing, working instead towards a progressive view of the eventual written outcome as inevitably encompassing the reading, thinking, note-taking and drafting. The resulting palimpsestic mindset would surely overcome the aforementioned anxieties.

Or I could post a verbose message to myself here, and thus procrastinate further. If only thinking wasn't so damned difficult...but then I guess everyone would do it, and then where would we be?