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
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