What’s the point of doing exercise or yoga? The answer is, usually, to keep yourself generally fit and toned up. Unless you’re preparing for an athletic event, there is no specific or direct point to any of it.

I think we need to keep our “writing muscles” toned up as well. Given that a writer is, by definition, someone who writes (as opposed to someone who just reads or thinks about writing), it’s important to keep writing even when you have nothing in particular to write about. Or nothing ‘important’.

For instance, the writing produced by using Oulipo techniques is often apparently pointless — the word stands, after all, for the workshop of potential literature. But it’s good for writing muscle toning.

Or sometimes writing anything, even if it’s inconsequential, can be a useful stimulus. For example, my latest article on my Eclecticsm blog/newsletter, No accounting for taste…, is about my gift of a jar of – well, you can read it for yourself!

Enjoy!