Moonlight And Shadows

While making this blog, I had a particularly hard time trying to think of a good enough title for it. Everything I came up with seemed to be already taken, whether it was phrases from my previously written poems or unusual pseudonyms I came up with for myself. After a moment of epiphany, I thought of the first thing I wrote since taking up writing again, and that became my blog title. Here it is in its entirety.

Moonlight and Shadows

It was midnight.
Beyond the broken door,
The room lay bare,
Completely filled with emptiness.
The wooden floor was covered
With a carpet of dust;
The walls bore no photographs
As evidence of the passage of time,
But intricately woven spiderwebs -
Delicate, sparkling, silent.

Moonlight streamed into the room
Through the shattered window;
But the room was already alight
By the flame of a single candle
Inexplicably placed in its surroundings,
Casting long shadows on the wall,
That swayed to a sombre rhythm
As the flame flickered in the wind
That came in through the window.

Nothing else moved.
Nothing made a sound.
Stillness and silence -
And a sudden darkness!
As the flame went out,
Leaving behind only
Moonlight and shadows.

Writer Blocked

I would like to believe I'm a writer, albeit a struggling one (in the true sense of the word - I struggle with myself); I haven't written anything substantial in well over two years, and I seem to be able to find nothing worth writing about anymore. I guess it's a phase every writer, struggling or otherwise, has to go through, when nothing inspires you and you find you cannot see anything in a new light, from a new perspective. Hence arises the problem; what do you write about? Or perhaps I should say, what do I write about?

Rowling writes about magic, Coelho about life, dreams and destiny, Brown about murders and conspiracy, and Meyer about centuries-old-yet-surprisingly-attractive-immortals. But such strokes of genius seem to elude me, leaving me with absolutely nothing to pick up my pencil for (for even this age of technology and iPhones, I prefer the traditional 0.5 HB as my tool of the trade.. for my first draft at least). I guess I could write about not having anything to write about, but that wouldn't really make for a very interesting read, now, would it?

x-x-x

There; it's just happened again! Certain affairs required my attention, and I had to take a breather. Now that I'm back, I have no idea HOW I can POSSIBLY continue this piece of text. I also wonder how i can possobly call myself a writer (among other things). I accept that I'll probably never write a novel, or even a short story for that matter. The most I've ever written (besides exams) is twenty-something incredibly depressing poems in my "emo" phase, but I don't like to categorise myself as a poet because I'd like to believe I'm capable of venturing into the dangerous, confusing world of prose, which I have only yet dared to explore a meagre couple of times (and which is the purpose of this blog). I accept the fact that I'll never win a Pulitzer or a Booker, I will never come up with a masterpiece that would send critics over the moon, and I will never pen anything that would be adapted into a summer blockbuster.

However, I know that after hours of extensive editing and rephrasing (a special shout out to the thesaurus in MS Word), I can come up with something at least half decent and worth reading (at least in passing). Whatever it may be, prose, poetry or haiku (which IS a form of poetry but I felt deserved special mention), I write. And for that, I call myself a writer, whether everyone else agrees or not.

P.S. I realise I ranted and rambled a lot here, but Wikipedia tells me freewriting is a way of tackling writer's block (just jotting down whatever comes to mind). And for that reason, this post will not be subjected to any editing.. or at least anymore than it has already endured .