“When I try to analyse my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualised route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.”
– Vladmir Nabokov, Lolita (1959), p.12
I hate it when my mind draws a blank.
This is especially maddening when I’m in the mood to write, which doesn’t happen too regularly these days. John Updike’s advice to aspiring writers is to write every day, however short the length or trivial the content, while Jonathan Safran Foer’s weekly routine consists of waking up at 4 am so that he could write for two hours before going to work. The fact that they practised what they preached is also what makes them Updike and Safran Foer, two of the best authors to have come out of the American post-war literati. To them, writing itself is religion, and the act of writing comparable to that of prayer.
Ideally, I’d follow in their footsteps, but the lure of sloth and sleep too often precludes my pursuit of more writerly ambitions. Regardless, I still keep a journal, which helps curb my laziness on the pen-moving front.
Classic Jenisms 