Too few words.

Every night, I entertain the idea of putting down my thoughts.  Tonight will be brilliant! Tonight, I will show the world why I want to be a writer! Tonight, I will create prose so perfect that established authors will weep and find ways to become as good as me.


Obviously, this has not come to pass. At best, I've been able to write paragraphs of meandering ideas where nothing is going on and where sentences seem to extend themselves beyond the horizon of concision and effectiveness. This fact does not make me feel great about my ability to write better in the future. Still, I persist. And still, I do so for an invisible audience.

I'm going to continue trying to get something done. I've found some inspiration in my life of late, and hope to put some of those feelings to work in getting something written down that doesn't make me want to vomit upon reading it.

How do authors do it? I doubt it's just skill. There has to be something that makes them able to endure their thoughts and find the will to just slog through the shit to write the gems they share with the world.

The things I've been learning.

Recently, I took a week off from doing the things I normally do to occupy my time. The reason for this was that I found myself in stasis. I stopped learning about the world.  Most of my reading became tailored to me.  The “articles” I read started consisting mostly of opinion pieces by people I knew I agreed with. I could read a headline and know immediately that I’d agree with them.  The “information” I sought was almost exclusively relevant to my very superficial hobbies and pastimes.  I lacked objectivity, I lacked variation, I lacked any sense of learning a new thing. So, I made a point of reading.  This was the true reason for the hiatus -  I wanted to re-learn to use reading as the thing I did when I was bored. It was met with pretty good success. I read. I consumed paper and ink more in one week than I have in the past 3 years.  It was amazing.  The best part is I learned some things.  Here’s a list of what those things are.

In no particular order:

I learned that I know too little about the world.

• I was way too surprised when I read a National Geographic article about Siberian Mammoth Tusk Hunters (best job ever?) and saw classic Mongolian faces identified with classic Russian names.  My brain knew about the vastness of Russia and it makes sense to me that the phenotype of the populace would change dramatically as you traveled from West to East. But, it was still surprising to see such a “classic Mongolian” look to the people of Russia.
• Laotian herb farmers have a tendency to lose limbs due to unexploded bombs left there by the Americans during the Viet Nam War era.  I will never look at lemongrass the same.
• Australia has a ridiculous amount of artistic hipsters that seem happier and less annoying than the classic North American Hipster that I’m used to. Also, their art is fun and earthy, without being easily identified as “Australian”. No kangaroos or koalas in site.
• Many countries simply don’t care about entertainment the way we do. For a lot of the world, people are the main source of entertainment. I’m extremely envious of this. I wonder if any culture exists that doesn’t know about the world “lonely.”

I learned that Modern Lit can be quite depressing.

• I read a few short stories that were submitted to various magazines by “bright, smart, witty, intelligent” up and coming authors.  Each one of them was basically about how our lives are only happy temporarily and that you’re essentially working towards failure in most endeavors.  
• Call me naïve or old fashioned, but I do enjoy a bit of hope or even just a “hey, life’s awesome” kind of story every now and then.
• Since when did being intelligent mean seeing only the shit around you?
• Still, I would probably enjoy having a beer with some of these authors. There’s no denying skill.
• I still think that “Catcher in the Rye” is overhyped shit.

I learned that I don’t understand everything in front of me.

• One of my favourite things that I read was an article about potato chips and how wealthy people pay a lot for bullshit without realizing it’s bullshit.
• Most potato chips are made from actual potatoes.
• Very few of them aren’t.
• Potatoes grow out of the ground in nature and are therefore “natural”
• Putting “natural” on a package lets you charge people more.
• Comparative marketing is the key to getting money
• Saying “ours is better than theirs” is the best way to have your higher price be seen as “worth it”.
• People with money to spend will gladly pay more if it means that the thing they’re shelling out for is “better” than the one the poor folks buy.
• If you want to sell to rich people, remind them how awesome they are.
• If you want to sell to poor people, remind them how awesome where they’re from is.  
• Marketers are basically assholes.
• This is my opinion, but good marketers are basically sociopaths who try to trigger sociopathic tendencies in their customers.  Dudley Moore made a movie that aligns with my thoughts on what would make “good” marketing.

I learned that I don’t like some of my old favourite authors as much as I used to.

• Frank Herbert’s kind of a dink.
• Stephen King is really good at naming people based on what it is they wear or do.
• Stephen R. Donaldson is a fucking asshole – I will not read his shit any longer.
• Same goes for Lovecraft. I’m pretty sure he would have been best buds with Hitler.

I learned that I still don’t have the patience to start a Jack Whyte book.

• Jack Whyte is awesome. He can manage to write about 2 men making an appointment to look at their calendars to maybe create some time for a meeting about planning a war.  This will be the most compelling few pages about their thought processes and how they interact with each other in that pre-pre-pre-pre-planning phase.  
• His books are good, engrossing reads, but the beginnings of all of his books just make me feel like I’m about to read the worst histori-drama ever.  
• I wish I knew better how to get over that “hump”

I learned that there are key words to making me not take someone seriously.

• Patriarchy. I get that it’s an issue, but blaming it for all the world’s woes doesn’t really explain much. Besides, we should be more concerned with the oligarchy which is slowly, but surely being manned by more and more females.
• Feminazi. I get that some feminists come across as caustic and aggressively pro-female/anti-male.  Fight the argument, not the person. Also, adding the suffix “Nazi” kind of softens just how much of a pure force of evil those bastards were.
• Liberal – when there’s a word that has so many degrees of meaning depending on what the subject matter is, it becomes a useless word.
• Conservative – Same as liberal. Just a lazy bit of word usage.
• Anything that tries to classify a person solely on one aspect of their belief becomes pointless as people and ideas are generally comprised of more than just one thing.
• A lot of articles and discussions I read had to do with people’s opinions.  Using shorthand words to disqualify a person’s opinion just seems lazy and annoying.
• I’m going to try and use fewer of these types of terms. I’ve avoided these specifically anyhow, but I’m going to be more aware of terms like them.
• Except for “Douche”. If I call someone a douche it’s simply because their ideas are so without merit that discussing anything further with or about them proves pointless and possibly detrimental

I learned that I like people, but don’t see enough of them.

• It’s not that I need more friends, I just need to see them more often.

I learned that video games still help me process thoughts.

• When I was young, I spent a lot of time in my head while playing video games. I process information the best when I’m partially distracted by something mundane. Video games helped me out here quite nicely.

I avoided quoting or even referencing what I read for the most part.  The reason for this is that I really enjoyed finding thoughts and ideas in publications that I wouldn’t normally read. I think it would be great if people found time to try and discover other views more often. I’m definitely going to start reading publications that are not necessarily in my “wheel house” with some regularity from now on. My brain feels more happy and satiated this week, and I’d like that to continue.

Alpha, Omega and the Gooey Center.

I'm sure there's someone who should be given sole recognition for telling burgeoning authors that you always start with the beginning, then you write the end, and then you figure out the middle. It makes sense.  The best jokes are the ones that have a clear punchline. The best books are the ones that leave you feeling some sort of closure. Even 1984, with its insanely depressing ending was clear and concise; you cared about the way it ended.  Ultimately, the ending matters less than what happened leading up to that point.  Nobody would care about the ending in that book if they weren't given some reason to care, some reason to want to see our protagonist win out.  This is why you write the middle last; it's more important than everything else. This is the part I suck at. This is the part that leaves me writing notes and flow charts and notes within my flow charts. I create an artistic masterpiece that would have Jackson Pollock envious of my ordered chaos. It doesn't help me write though. It simply helps me feel overwhelmed and unable to move on and do something with my ideas.

I need help. If anyone's actually reading this, can you help me out?  I need many beginnings and many ends. I need to practice the middle parts. I want to see point A, point B and then practice getting from one to the other. The reason I want help here is that I don't want to care about either point though. I just want to practice writing as a matter of fact, not as a matter of investigating my own ideas and niether as an exercise in clomping through my own literary comfort zones.

So, if anyone wants to provide me with some Beginning/End combos, send them to me. I'll try my best to flesh out the middle and then post them here for critique and evisceration.

Thank you in advance.

Ideally, there should be answers.

I obsess. Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I can allow myself to dive deeply into ideas that have managed to surface in my muddled mind. The process is simple.

I find something/someone new.
I ask questions.
I become intrigued by the answers.
I ask more questions.

This is the way I've been for most of my life.  There are always questions that I have, and I always want to know more; I want to know everything that there is to know, then I want to know how all of this known stuff works.  This usually means that - if this interest is a person - they either get extremely freaked out by me, or they start to think that I love them.   If the interest expressed is in an author, an artist, a musician, then it usually means that I get to spend time collecting and absorbing things they created and increase my understanding of them.  I want to understand things that excite me. I want to have their cogs, gears, springs and whirlygigs shown to me; I want to know not only what makes them tick, but why they tick, what made the ticking necessary... Ultimately, I have this need to know things.

Which brings me to my point. Writing is annoying for me. I have heard a few authors speak of themselves less as creators and more as chroniclers of stories. The characters and events already exist, they're just putting it all to paper and ensuring that the stories get told. To some, this may seem like hogwash - that the authors are just trying to make themselves seem like they have tapped into some currents of reality that we normals just can't see or feel. I feel however, that they're just great question askers. They can come up with an idea like  "A guy puts a ball on a table" and flesh it out by asking a million questions. "What kind of ball? What kind of room is this table in? What made this guy choose this ball on this day in this room?"  Their attention to detail could easily be called an attention to questions.  I'm good at this. I can always ask these questions.  Good authors though seem to be able to answer them as well. They are great askers, but fuck - those people can answer the fuck out of a question. This is where I start to lose my shit and have all attempts at writing collapse until I'm a shattered mess with a page full of ineffective horseshit with a few nuggets of decent ideas that just can't be explored enough by my incapable mind.

I'm going to work on making it more capable. I'm going to try and focus on answers for a while. Rather than simply asking questions, I'm going to try and sherlock my way into providing answers. Maybe I'll write a bit better. Either way, I suspect that I'll start to see information a bit differently.

Creative Endeavors Have to Begin Somewhere

There are few things that truly, truly motivate me to improve myself.  Being the beast of a human that I am - the sad fact is that the few true motivators in my life have been fear and pleasure. A promise of either will usually sway me temporarily in one direction or another. Either full momentum, or full inertia.  Few are the times where I can just do something because I want to, or because I feel like it's something that would have value in and of itself.

I used to write a lot. It was shit. It was garbage. It was absolutely, without a doubt, some of the most poorly written drivel ever put to page. There were turns of phrases that were so clever to my youth addled mind, that I sincerely thought myself to be brilliant: "He thought he saw the impossible, but realized immediately that it could not be so.". I mean, the basic idea there is ok, maybe slightly humourous.  But the phrase is shit. Pure shit.

I wrote a story about something I found interesting; humans had ethereal beings attached to them that we could not observe in any way. These beings protected us in subtle ways and then, once our lives were over, they took us to the Great Beyond. Essentially, our Guardian Angels were also our Angels of Death. The idea still excites me. The things my brain thought of regarding these things. If you managed to extricate yourself from one of these things, could you then be immortal? would you be less lucky now that you had no guardian guiding you and protecting you? What if your body decayed and you were mortal, but your soul had nowhere to go, or rather no thing to take you there? I put forth the idea that nature abhorred a vacuum, so once one body stopped working, the soul would jettison itself and try to find a new host - an unborn human about to reach that point of gestation where it became human.  See. My ideas were pretty good (well, I think so anyhow).  The simple story had questions: when is a human a human? what makes us a human? what would happen if we had all of our experiences in memory but had to go through the process of birth, growing up and setting up a new life with new challenges?  The idea of exploring this tickled my mind splendidly. When writing out the prose, though... When writing these ideas down, I found myself shitting all over my thoughts. I had no way of organizing these ideas; no way of making sure that I said what I wanted to say; no way of ensuring that the thoughts I loved so much weren't going to be twisted and sullied by prose that would make 4th graders cringe displeasure.

Back to my point.
I want to write again. Not for any real reason. I just want to write. I don't want it to be shit though. I don't want it to be the type of crap that I'd want to hide in the deepest chasms out of shame and frustration. I'm going to teach  myself to write well. I'm going to take my ideas and shape them.  I may write a few paragraphs here and there. I may rewrite the same things 20 times, all with slight changes, all with hopeful improvements. I may even abandon this idea for a while.  But, when I do write, I will write with one goal in mind: to get in writing the thoughts that excite me.

This is for myself, but if you're reading this, you're welcome to comment and critique all you want.

-R