Can a Person Still Write Offline?

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

Writers enjoy instant gratification on the internet. We expect feedback within minutes of posting an idea. Without it, we feel crippled and dis-empowered unlike our fathers who secluded themselves for years, wrote only to God, and never had any assurance that anyone else would read what they were writing.

I wonder if they hit dry spells in the desert.

If you are a writer and you don’t write much for a while, you have to struggle with a certain measure of guilt mingled with fear. You feel you should be writing, that there are tens of people bereft of your wisdom and charming words.

The internet does not lend itself to seasons. It cries out for constancy.

On the other hand, despite all your advice to others to write something every day, you know that you have seasons in your life. You have times of intense productivity and times when something has to brew inside of you.

It is like one of our California rivers that rises and recedes with the flow of its water supply from the mountains.

Then comes the panic. Will I ever write again? Will I ever again be seized with a passion, desire, or creative urge?

Will I ever again have a creative idea?

Will I be forgotten? Will I lose all my readers who, as it is, cling by a thin thread?

Suddenly, we want to write whether or not we have something about which to write.

That season often arrives as a flash flood and often when ones life has been filled with things to do, places to go, and people to see. Life gets in the way of art.

… And we are far away from our computers hooked to the internet …

It raises an interesting question. Can a person still write offline?