There are so many platforms for creativity out there these days. From blogging, and microblogging, through Substack, Tumblr, Pinterest and Instagram, and that is before I start with video-based platforms like TikTok. This, of course, is good news, but when you have the best intentions, a basket of half-baked ideas, and the attention span of a goldfish, it can make life very confusing.
I have been blogging in some shape or form, on and off, for about 20 years. The irony is, if I had stuck with one space and worked on it consistently then I might have something quite decent to show for it. But, as the great chef, philosopher and wordsmith Gino D’Acampo once put it, “if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike”.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that it’s been a while since I wrote anything here on Millennial Gent, and with a hell of a summer now cooling into one of my favourite seasons of the year, it seems like a good time to try and start up once more.
As I often do at this point, I have found myself dipping into George Orwell’s essay Why I Write. I do this quite a lot, partly because the title of the essay is a question I ask myself quite a lot. Of course there is the fact that I do it for a living and I need to pay my bills and do other things which seem to go hand-in-hand with being a grown-up. As Hunter S Thompson phrased it: “I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor (sic), so writing is the only recourse left for me.”
But the trouble is, that the ability to churn out a few hundred, or thousand, words on a topic like the growth of the tequila market, or a new store in an Australian airport on deadline, does not translate to being able to sit and write about things in my own time.
Orwell correctly observed that what we write about (and, I would argue how we share it) is a product of the time in which we live. Today, content is king. But he also makes two other interesting points. He says he never writes because he wants to create art, but because “there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.” We all want a hearing, but the challenge is having something to say. As Orwell continues:
It is invariably where I lacked political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
I have known a fair few purple passages, sentences without meaning and humbug in my attempts to write. But that is not going to stop me. In fact, like a madman doing the same thing and expecting a different result I am trying to dive back in.
In the past year or so I have been reading a lot by Austin Kleon, the American “writer who draws” and author of three excellent books Steal Like An Artist, Keep Going and Show Your Work! He also writes a Substack which I recommend following. Each of his books is crafted into a series of tips, tricks and lessons and I have stolen a list of some of my favourites here. They seem most pertinent right now.
So, in an attempt to give myself the best possible shot, I am off again. For those of you who have had any interest in my ShortManStyle efforts, I have transferred that over to a dedicated Substack page, which you can follow here. My aim is to make that a standalone project, which I’ll approach with a bit more focus and professionalism than the rest of this nonsense. But who knows.
All my links are below, if anything interests you, please do click and follow.
⚓️ Millennial Gent
⚓️ ShortManStyle
📓 MG Tumblr (a digital scrapbook)
📸 ShortManStyle Insta
📸 MG Insta
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