Script Frenzy!

This past November I participated in a writing event called NaNoWriMo. The goal of the event was to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch within the month of November. I finished the goal on Thanksgiving, having created a terrible novel that would induce in any reader effects similar to opening the Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Alas, it’s a 1st draft, with notes to myself for the 2nd draft. Most important, it is written, and while I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a novelist, I have written something that could perhaps be considered a novel. Or a piece of crap, the definitions are a little hazy.

I’d like to write more novels in the future of course, preferably over periods of time longer than a month. I consider myself a fiction writer, and a bit of an amateur poet – I mean, I write poetry every now and then, but I already have the rare and unlikely goal of being a successful novelist, being a successful poet might just be an oxymoron. But when a majority of your friends specialize in writing scripts, and when these said friends start taking to sending you their scripts for your thoughts, and when you find them actually enjoying your comments on their scripts, you begin to wonder – maybe I could write a script too? Just maybe. It was great because I could always use that beautiful word, “someday.” “Someday I wanna write a screenplay!” When is someday? Any relation to Sunday? Far from it, because it’s not tomorrow, or next month, or next year really. It’s any day you want it to be, which usually turns out to be never.

Cue Script Frenzy, another writing event run by the guys & gals of NaNoWriMo where the challenge is to write 100 pages of a script – play, screenplay, graphic novel, Ulysses-style fantasy sequence – during the month of April. Like NaNoWriMo, it’s supposed to get you going. When are you going to write your script? April! And I thought about it, and I went, “y’know, maybe someday is in April!”

So sure, I’m a little rough on the exact formatting rules. Hey, those friends of mine have script-formatting books I can borrow! Not to mention the advent of formatting programs like Celtx, which does all the tab-spacing for you, so you can get down to the bare-bones of writing, namely, your flat characters and your boring plot (I’m speaking from my own experience of course). As for the other rules to follow with screenplays, for your final draft they’re definitely something that needs to be brought in check, but for a first draft, hey, no one’s gonna read it anyway. If you don’t know how to do something, wing it!

I’m 28 pages in so far. 28 pages of a lot of fun at not having to write lines and lines of poetic narration. 28 pages of probably every flaw that 1st-time screenwriters are told to avoid in their 1st screenwriting class. But hey, it’s 28 pages of a script! And yes, things are already going horribly and painfully wrong – one scene has useless characters that we’ll never see again, another just goes way too long without any real purpose. But hey…28 pages!

The cool thing about these events, especially for a 1st-timer like me, is that constant question nagging you: can I actually do this? Rather, it should be, will I actually do this – of course I can write a 100 page script, whether it’s completed in April is the real issue. But that’s part of the real joy in these things. Both my idea for this and my idea for NaNoWriMo are my babies, I wanna work with them and shape them into beautiful, elegant creations. These 1st drafts are gonna be a bit ugly. But just doing it, regardless of any excuse I could come up with, and getting that 1st draft out of the way, and writing alongside millions of other writers across the country, possibly even the world – someday is definitely today then!

So wish me luck in my Script Frenzy endeavors. I’m sure I’ll write about the experience after I (successfully hopefully!) finish it up. I mean, it can’t be that hard, right? Right?!

Why Blog? (Part 2/Reconstruction)

I read a blog-post a couple months ago about why writers shouldn’t blog.  The gist was that, if you want to be a fiction writer, blogging is really just another distraction from actually writing fiction, unless of course it’s a blog where you post the fiction that you’ve written.  I laughed at the post at the time, so silly!  I never did that!  Sure, maybe my Sunday nights were a free night of not writing fiction because I was writing 2 original blog-posts and posting poetry on my 3^rd blog; maybe a couple other nights of the week found an excuse from fiction writing by writing poetry for that 3^rd blog.  But I totally wasn’t procrastinating from writing with all my blogs!  I think…

I killed a blog tonight.  For Facebook profiles, you can never fully delete yours; they always save your info, just in case you’re itching for some news-feed profile statuses and decide to start it back up one day.  But when a blog is gone, it’s gone forever.  Go ahead, try to go to pensandlightsabers.wordpress.com.  Yeah, it’s gone.  I killed that blog in cold blood, and all the stuff I wrote there is gone, never to be read again (particularly by the 50 or so people who ever visited the blog while it was alive).

These last remaining blogs might as well be dead, considering I haven’t posted on them since early January.  Gone is the chance to do my love-poem post for badlovepoets, or to figure out some convoluted and hopefully-but-not-really complex post on love for Nobody’s Rambler.  But really, is the world that much worse off without those thoughts?

There’s a fatal conundrum to blogging: on the one hand, you’re writing your thoughts out into cyberspace, knowing that anyone can find them, anyone who wants to read them, or needs to read them, and maybe feel some connection, some insight, something at least; on the other hand, you know you’re probably not going to be Perez Hilton or any of the other wildly famous blogs out there.  You write because you want hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to read your blog and identify with you, but you keep reminding yourself that, at the most, you might get a hundred views on a single post because it’s about Facebook, or the Oscars, or Star Wars, and that, most weeks, you’ll be averaging between 2 and 10, 20 if it’s a particularly good one.

And that’s part of the reason why I stopped posting, but there was also the issue that it wasn’t fun anymore.  I kept trying to find lofty topics to post on, when really, I’m out of that phase of lofty-thinking.  Sure, I think about love and art and life a lot, but these are on-going things that I’m learning about, that I’ll never have a comprehensive knowledge or wisdom on, and it just feels kinda pointless to post things I know I’m gonna feel differently about later on.  I could never say what I wanted to say, because I knew I didn’t know all there was to say yet.

But I’m blogging now!  How can this be?!

My inspiration comes from Sloane Crosley, who’s personal essays from the collection I Was Told There’d Be Cake I found hilarious, entertaining, and on-the-whole forgettable.  There are a couple that had themes and issues worth reflecting over, but reading them just made me realize how flawed they were as personal essays, and how successful other writers have been, like Sarah Vowell and David Sedaris.  Some were too long, some were too short, most were overloaded with humor, others just didn’t seem to have much point other than a stray laugh or two.  And I figured to myself, I can do just as well, if not better.

I know eventually I’ll probably write about love or art or life, but on the whole, I’m revamping this blog into a weekly series of 2-page personal essays (this one’s slightly longer, so sue me).  Why personal essays?  Because, in a sense, I did really kill something tonight – at heart, a blog isn’t a novel or a book of poetry, hiding the writer under characters and plot and themes and style.  A blog is the person himself.  The internet surely doesn’t need another person foolish enough to write about himself, but the internet’s a pretty damn big place, so it’s not like I’m taking up space.  And I’ll do my best to make my life as interesting as possible, which’ll be a good writing exercise – if my life can sound interesting, anything can.  As for why 2 pages?  I’m taking a fiction-writing class right now where we write 2-page stories every week: you can write a lot in 2-pages.

So, this is the new Nobody’s Rambler.  It will be weekly.  It will probably be less accessible and a bit mediocre.  It will be me, me, Me!  And if you don’t like it, well, it’s in the title – I’m just a Nobody anyway, so you can move on like you didn’t even stop by at all.

Why Blog?

Blogs are one of those funny things that people both love and hate: love how anyone can write and be heard, how people’s ordinary thoughts can be experienced in all their unintentional poetry; hate how the internet is now filled with people going on about their inane, mundane lives, as though people actually cared about what they had for breakfast, or how little Molly’s doing at school.  I think any healthy-minded blogger is aware of that dichotomy of opinion, pestering them in the back of their heads – does anyone really care about this blog?

For me, the question hits hardest when I think of my journals.  I used to write (with actual pens on actual paper!) in a journal probably every-other-day in high school, filling composition notebooks with my idealized thoughts about humanity and art and life.  I didn’t have much of an interest in the social-sphere of the internet until Senior year of high school, when I finally caved in and got a Myspace.  Suddenly, whenever I had a journal-worthy thought, it got written about in a Myspace note instead, so that my journal collected dust while I was glued to a glowing computer screen at midnight, typing out my thoughts and emotions furiously.  The main difference, of course, was that with Myspace, I had an audience – true, the audience was mostly my friends, but it was still something that could be read casually by other people, as opposed to the private notebook next to my bed which no one would ever read.

Was I just starved for attention?  Probably, at least a little bit.  I had never had an outlet for my philosophical ideas like that before, a place to post them that other people might comment on them, praise them, criticize them, whatever they wanted to say about them.  Is that still the case now, the reason why I’m here this very moment, blogging about blogging?  Again, probably, at least a little bit.

I think the idea of having an audience is a really beneficial tool though when it comes to writing.  There’s a difference between writing something you don’t think anyone will ever see, and writing something you know people might eventually tune into and check out.  Before doing any serious writing for short stories or novels or poetry or whatever, I usually just write out random stray thoughts I have, filling up a page with whatever troubles and issues are on my mind at the moment.  It’s like the exercise of writing 750 words a day, except there’s no real regulation to it, and I just write it out whenever I’m about to do my writing, not necessarily in the mornings.  Knowing I’m about going to delete it right after it’s written, I probably write more honestly there than anywhere else – it also makes for pretty incoherent reading, since I jump from thought to thought without a moment’s notice.

With an audience, even a mythical blog-audience that may or may not exist (I know people read this blog, but I highly doubt they regularly check in), there’s the mind-set that what you write should be well-written, coherent, and, maybe most importantly, purposeful.  I can easily start a blog that consists of me detailing my days down to the most minute details, but who would wanna read that?  I guess the way I come at blogs is by asking, how can I make this not a waste of internet-space? It’s a very specific thing to blog your thoughts and ideas instead of simply writing them in a journal, and part of the allure is the community that comes with a blog – maybe someone will read your blog, maybe even like it, comment on it, give helpful insights and criticism.  It makes the act of writing alone in a room a little less quiet.

NaNoWriMo – Hiatus

I’ve been making the rounds on all my other blogs, so I might as well post something about it on this one too.  For the month of November, I’ll be attempt NaNoWriMo, which, for those who don’t know, stands for National Novel Writing Month, or as I like to call it, suicide.  The goal is to write 50,000 words of a novel within the span of November.  I’ve got my idea, I’ve done my planning, and all that’s left is to just do it – which is gonna be crazy hard, considering that it comes out to about 4-5 pages of writing a day, more for those inevitable days that’ll be making up for the bad days when I can’t physically/mentally/alloftheabove write anymore, and all of this on top of writing school papers/presentations and keeping up with school reading, which includes increasingly difficult chapters of Ulysses, and The Waves by Virginia Woolf, which I’ve read before and love, but is still a bit of a hurdle in terms of reading quickly.  Ironically, I’m lucky to not have a job taking up half of my week, but it’s not gonna make this writing any easier really.

Because I feel like I’m gonna be rather frustrated and tested this month in terms of writing, I’m going on a tentative hiatus for the month of November.  I say tentative because, for all I know, blog-writing will be blissful come, say, the 2nd week of novel-writing, when writing about something that’s not my novel might feel a lot easier than write my novel.  But I don’t want keeping up my blogs to be an obligation, the last thing I need for November is more writing obligations.  So I might write here, I might not.  At the most, I’ll try to post as soon as possible at the beginning of December to announce whether I’ve accomplished the 50,000 mark or not.  God, I’m so not ready for this, but if everyone who wanted to write a novel waited until they were “ready,” a lot of great novels would’ve never been written.

So that’s my story for November and my tentative hiatus.  Hopefully I’ll find some time and energy to write a little something here before December rolls around, otherwise, wish me luck!  And good luck to all my fellow NaNoWriMo-writers, we’re all gonna need it.

Emoticons & Texting: The New Language

I began learning text-shorthand back in high school, probably 10th or 11th grade – whenever I downloaded AIM for the first time.  I resisted at first, mostly as a reaction to friends of mine whose IM’s were filled with misspellings and letter-omissions.  It would be accurate to describe myself as somewhere between an apathetic-speller and a spelling-nazi – I never bothered correcting my friends’ spelling when it was off (mostly because the conversation never would’ve moved past that and no one would’ve talked to me online anymore), but I figured it was still possible to IM quickly and spell accurately.  More to the point though, I began noticing everyone use text-shorthand, which wasn’t common-speech yet.  I didn’t even know what lol meant at first, much less it’s variations – lmao, lmfao, rotflmao.  I slowly picked up things at the speed that my internet could teach me them (not very fast at all), and I got a rudimentary grasp on lol-speak (as I’ve always called it).  Eventually I began to incorporate smiley’s and what few other emoticons I happened to see others use – it was like learning a new language, watching the way other people used things and incorporating it all into my own IM-speech.

The funny thing, though, is that I began to have the urge to type a smiley or an lol in my school papers.  I’d be typing and feel like a sentence needed to be punctuated with a 🙂 or a :/.  They even began invading my thoughts – I’d hear something funny and think lol to myself.  As I think about it now, the degree to which I gave myself to IM-speech just increased over time – at first I would think each letter of lol separately, but after a few years it would just come out as one word, as though it was a word.

In a way, though, I think emoticons and lol-speech are part of language.  I probably use things more strictly than most people, but I think most people have rules to how they use emoticons, and you can read a person’s personality in them.  You’d be confused if someone texted you “Today’s a beautiful day! :/”  It seems silly to say “that shouldn’t be there, it doesn’t fit with the sentence,” but it’s entirely true.  It’d be like saying “I feel so sharp today” – sure, that adjective can fit into that sentence, but it makes no sense until you explain yourself.  Emoticons even have the ability to punctuate a sentence.  Let’s take the sentence “tonight’ll be fun.”  If you punctuate that with “tonight’ll be fun :P,” the reader can infer that there’s something sarcastic about that sentence – that 😛 functions like the rolling of your eyes or the inflection of your voice in a way.  Or with IM-speech, take the sentence “I hate my life.”  That by itself sounds like a pretty serious statement, but if it reads instead “I hate my life lol,” suddenly the person’s voice has a more carefree acceptance of things, like they’re laughing off whatever misfortune has happened.

It’s one of those things I find fascinating as part of our modern culture.  These are additions that’ll never be part of official grammar – the books of the future won’t be written with “lol’s” and :)’s.  But nearly everyone knows these anyways – they’re great for familiar conversations with friends via texting, IMing, email, etc.  Their grammar is widely-known, though the rules are never written down or read about, and they don’t need to be.  Linguists often comment on the slow progression of language, how it slowly changes over hundreds of years, but here we have a new kind of language that has shaped itself up relatively over night.  Who knows, maybe someone can/has/will write something that starts to see what this new element of language can do.  It’s just a fascinating development, and it almost makes me wanna start writing my school-papers with the occasional or btw.  I’m sure my professors would be amused, 😛

Handwriting vs. Typing

I’ve had a number of writing professors (for both fiction and poetry) tell me in class that there is nothing better, nothing, than writing things out by hand.  It’s mostly encouraged with poetry, but I’ve had a professor or two preach the benefits of editing short stories by hand.  Luckily they didn’t go so far as to require 10 page short stories to be written by hand, but they’d really push for going through your edits on paper before typing them up.  Poetry is where professors really go for pen and pencil though – they always mention that poetry written on a keyboard feels cold and mechanical, that it feels wrong writing poetry on a computer, that it has to be done by hand, on paper, in ink or lead, possibly blood if you wanna get gothic.  Personally, I don’t think it makes a goddamn difference.

I’ve written journal entries both in actual journals and on Microsoft Word, I’ve written poetry on keyboards and in my moleskine, I even wrote a few short stories by hand, along with the number I’ve written on my laptop.  I can tell you I like to write short stories on a computer, cause when I write by hand, I think ahead to the next sentence I wanna write, then will forget it will I’m busy finishing up the first sentence.  I can write journal entries faster with a keyboard, but the speed makes it easier to digress and ramble, whereas writing by pen focuses me more on the topic at hand, and I can think deeper about whatever I’m pondering.  As for poetry, I have the same problem with writing poetry by hand and laptop as I do with writing poetry and fiction in general – sometimes I feel like doing one, sometimes I feel like doing the other.  I’ve written some good poems in my moleskine lately, and I’ve written some fine ones on my laptop.  I’ve resorted to using Notepad instead of Microsoft Word, cause I really don’t need that fancy formatting to write a poem, but my moleskine can work fine too.

It’s true that there’s a finesse to writing things out by hand, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a pleasure to feel my favorite brand of pens against paper, dashing T’s and curling my &’s and S’s with the flick of a wrist.  There’s something nice and down-to-earth about handwriting, something traditional in it.  And you get the added bonus of the individuality of handwriting.  There’s a reason why it takes skill to forge someone’s signature well – having the freedom of a pen or a pencil allows you to really make your mark while you write.  If you know someone’s handwriting well enough, you can even read their mood in the letters – small, hurried, anxious letters, or maybe the flourishes of love.  Some friends of mine think handwriting will become a dead skill someday, and they’re probably right.  Back in Middle school and early on in High school, they thought it’d happen in our lifetimes though, and I know that won’t happen.  There’s something too pleasant about handwriting to give it up just yet.

But it does take way too goddamn long sometimes, and that’s where typing comes in handy.  Imagine having to write 30 page research papers by hand…yeah, as if they weren’t fun enough before.  I don’t know about everyone else, but I get a kick out of typing too, feeling my hands dash along the keyboard, hitting the buttons with the precision of my ideas.  I’m probably making it sound way too glamorous, but it’s still a cool feeling, seeing your thoughts appear on the screen so quickly.  But you also get: emoticons and text-speak!  lol, 🙂  Most people probably think they’re too childish to be used in actual conversation, but people say the same thing about comic books, and titles such as Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and Watchmen dispute that well enough.  After IM’ing or texting for a while, you really do incorporate these things into your language.  The interesting thing about phrases like “lol” and “:D” is that we each develop our own definition of them.  They’re more abstracted from meaning than typical language, so the cases in which one person might use “lol” can differ entirely from another person’s usage.  Plus, it’s just plain easier to edit things when you have a computer.  You can mark things on paper all you want, but in the end you’re gonna have a damn near incomprehensible rough copy that’ll probably be jigsawed enough to need to be rewritten again anyway, a problem blissfully fixed with copy-and-pasting.

The way I see it, if it feels right, do it – in terms of writing I mean, 😛  If staring at a blank piece of paper is more annoying than inspiring, whereas a blank computer screen seems like an invitation to fantastical ideas, type!  If it’s vice versa, grab a pen!  Personally, I think every writer should at least have a pen and moleskine on his/her person at all times.  A friend of mine was composing a poem on his iPhone the other day – and then his iPhone died, and he had no way of continuing to work on the poem, which could’ve been handled had he simply brought a moleskine.  Plus, you always seem to get the perfect idea for something during the day, and if you don’t write it down, it’ll be that idea and that idea alone that gets eaten up by time and forgetfulness.  But as for really working on your writing – it’s up to you.  A computer really only hinders your writing if you don’t like the feel of typing, but if your ideas come to you just fine when using a keyboard, by all means, use one! Doesn’t matter if it’s a pen or a keyboard, the same hands are still using them to create your art.

Poetry and Prose

To start, I’ll apologize for my blogposts recently; though I created this blog as a way of writing out my rambling thoughts, I’ve been particularly scatter-brained lately, and fear that everything I’ve been writing is a bit incoherent.  Hopefully this one will go a bit better?

I sometimes wonder if there’s a difference between poetry and prose at all anymore.  I can’t help but wonder if that’s why I’ve begun to grow vaguely interested in screenwriting, a wholly different format from the two.  At this point, the closest to a clear distinction would probably be both rhythm/meter and physical form.  But even these have become somewhat obsolete.  As it is, it’s probably best if one simply “trusts” an author’s self-claimed distinction: “Well, he called this a poem, so I guess it’s a poem.”

Whitman’s partially to blame, spreading free verse so rapidly as an influence.  If anything, I’m sure it was a huge relief to poets everywhere.  I enjoy some classic poetry, mostly the Romantics, like Keats, Coleridge, and a bit of Wordsworth and Shelley, but also Pope.  I’d mention Milton, but he was only a step away from Whitman really, keeping only the meter with the famous Paradise Lost.  But I can’t read poems like those for inspiration concerning my own style.  My Puerto Rican roommate wants to try writing poetry in English, and he’s more of a lover of those classic poets than I am.  But my sensibilities are strictly towards a lack of rhyming and a rhythm – not to say I shun rhythm, but lean more towards accentual rhythm if anything.  I gave my hand at rhyming and syllables in high school, and I can do away with it.

If anything, this frees poetry up to be more poetic, or poetic on a different sensibility, and this is where the “physical form” that I mentioned earlier comes in.  By that, I mean simply how the poem looks on a page, where the lines are broken and how.  I call this “physical” because it’s something that usually can’t be expressed in the reading of the poem – line breaks are often enjambments of sentences, cutting them for the effect of a word or image, and, in my opinion anyway, shouldn’t be read as punctuation marks.  They couldn’t be anyways, and one could look at a complex e.e. cummings poem to know why: you’d be pausing every 3 words, and no one would know what those breaks mean until they physically saw at the poem.  It allows for such an inventive line of creativity, one that’s literally inexhaustible.  I’d even go so far as to say that a poem could be relined – that is, given line breaks in different places – and have a slightly altered meaning.

But with freedoms like these always come the absolute deviation, and thus we come to prose poetry.  I’ve seen numerous examples of prose poetry, some appearing like more coherent versions of Finnegan’s Wake, others seeming quite like regular prose.  In one of his volumes of short stories, Jorge Luis Borges refers to his works as “verses,” refusing to create a distinction between prose and poetry.

For me, the separation is usually a matter of concentration: my poems will tend to be a single thought or image, while my stories take on narrative complexities.  But of course there are poems that tell stories, even modern poems like Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, not to mention the longer works of Browning, Wordsworth, and Tennyson.  And there are short stories that tell the complexity of a single moment as well as any poem.  You might be confused when reading a Virginia Woolf novel, confused that it’s not actually a poem by T.S. Eliot, with its disparate scenes that seemlessly blend into one another, or harshly for that matter.  The other night, I was working on a short story I’m writing, and the form of a particular sentence caught my attention.  I realized, in the span of a single and rather short sentence, I could show a spectrum between 2 characters, starting the sentence with one personality and ending it on the next.  This is quite a small thing, but if one so wished, one could give prose the formal complexity of a poem, each sentence its own significance.  The reason most of us prose writers don’t is because we’d drive ourselves crazy during the editing process, wondering if there was any other way to arrange the description of a window that exemplified the effect of looking out a window. I’d never finish a story, and I write them slow enough as it is!

This ramble isn’t meant to have a real conclusion, only to offer my thoughts on the subject – there is no real conclusion, so long as genres are what they are: messy, vague, and made to be broken.  But, as past posts have shown, I’m obsessed with form, and I think it’d be quite an interesting thing to come at one medium and wonder how the sensibilities of the other could be applied.  Not only does this offer new possibilities for each medium, but it makes one more highly aware of the differences between the two forms, and the qualities of each one.  One might not think anything of line breaks until wondering how they could be used in prose, and then they seem to have a huge power in poetry as well.  And the blending won’t stop with poetry and prose either – I wonder if screenplay/comics poems will be written/drawn, or if any books will be written under the sensibility of a screenplay.

In the mean time, poetry and prose are still a mess of distinction.  A bisexual friend described her sexuality to me once, saying that she was always bisexual – she didn’t see why anyone wouldn’t find both sexes attractive.  I’m a bit of the same way with poetry and prose – can one write one and not the other?  I thought I could, thought I could write solely fictional prose, but somehow poetry caught me again.  I know I’m supposing that everyone is a writer like me, constantly wondering into the nature of form and style.  I doubt Stephanie Mayer worries herself over poetry very much.  But I think the second you wonder about form, no matter which one of the two you write, the other becomes inextricable, always somewhat of a problem, yet always a bit of a solution too.

Writing vs. Talking

Since I recently did a post on reading poetry outloud, I might as well be honest with myself and do a post about writing and talking.

It’s happened on a few occasions that a brave individual will notice a certain sadness in my eye, a quick and muffled sigh, followed immediately by a smile to cover it all up.  It happened once during senior year of high school, while hanging out with my friend Jessica Leigh (I only include the last name because I know so many Jessica’s).  We would hang out a lot, and I talked her through some hard times during that period of her life.  I had grown used to being the comfort guy, I wasn’t resentful of it at all, I just liked to help out my friend and get her through things.  One day I was at her house, helping her with some homework, when she caught my sadness, a momentary shadow in my face.  “What’s wrong?” she asked.  How I hate that question.

The same thing happened again the next year, during Freshman year of college.  My friend Tyler noticed it as well and asked the same question.  “It’s complicated,” I told him.  “C’mon,” he said, “we should talk.  What’s on your mind?”  I convinced him to hold off the conversation until later, when we were drunk – unfortunately, this ended up being outside of one of the other dorm halls, while he was drunk and I was sober, and our friend Sam hanging out with us too.

I can describe both of these situations in one sitting: confronted by the question, I sat back, thought over it all for a good 15 minutes, then said some general and semi-bullshitty things that were bothering me, but were definitely not the cause of my occasional sadness.  I hate that question, “What’s wrong?” because I never know how to answer it at the moment it’s asked.  Sometimes I do, I’ll admit, but not often, only in cases when it’s something rather obvious and immediate, like loneliness or guilt over some issue brought up recently.  It’s not that it’s on the tip of my tongue waiting desperately to be told – at that immediate moment, it’s simply not there at all.

The same thing occurs to me in other areas as well, especially intellectually.  Ask me in person to think over a passage of poetry and I’ll nod my head, consider the words – they’ll probably seem very lovely and powerful, in some way that I just can’t quite figure out.  And I won’t, not at that moment.  You can push and prod me all you want, but when it comes down to things, down to me verbally expressing myself, you’ll be out of luck.  The answer is not hidden, I simply can’t even think of it.

Give me some paper instead.  I love the written word, love the way it feels underneath my fingers, love flicking and swirling my pen across paper.  More importantly, I love my thoughts when I’m writing – they’re so much clearer for some reason, more coherant and interesting.  I really can’t explain why this is.  The difference between mediums comes up even if you ask me about an event.  In talking about it, I’ll go over a detail, then another, then another, then realize I forgot one, then go on, then forget another one – not to mention the painful repetition of words and phrases and idioms and what not.  It’s a bit of a mess.  But if you ask me to write it, I might forget a detail or two that needs to be cleared up, but far less than when I’m talking, and it becomes so much easier to find the words for it all too.

This isn’t to say that I can only think while writing.  I think perfectly fine thoughts throughout my days – and I write them down.  Sometimes I’ll write down a thought, get asked about it later on, and have no idea exactly how to describe it.  On paper, I could write love poems, love stories, love essays, novels and anthologies on how much I love a person.  In person, the only words I can ever seem to find that aren’t cheezy are “you’re pretty,” and “I love you.”  Then again, I suppose those are the only ones you really need.  I could write critiques of books and movies, but lose the sentiments when talking about them.

Perhaps it’s a problem with the speed of my thoughts – my mouth has been known to run faster than my brain.  Or perhaps it’s a matter of time – the demand for immediacy stilts my thinking, while the comfort of paper allows for more freedom.  I don’t think of it all that much as a problem or a disability – it simply is.  I don’t mind having thoughts that need a pen to catch them from the air.  It’s true that it makes it difficult to express my feelings, but they can still find their outlet.  Maybe I should start asking girls out by texting them my feelings while I stand next to them.  I suppose the main thing I worry about is when people reprove me for it – there’s such an importance placed on verbal expression.  I won’t shun that of course, otherwise I’ll have a hard time making it through life!  But thoughts and emotions are simply easier for me to describe and explain through writing.  In person, I can admit, “I love you,” but in writing I can describe the extent to which that love goes, recreate it more vividly on paper than in the air.

So if you ask me “what’s wrong?” and I don’t answer, it’s not because I’m shy and need coaxing out – I legitimately won’t be able to think of the right words until I’m considering it all later, alone, over some paper or on my laptop.  Perhaps I’ll answer you via email.

Hating the Things We Love

Lately I wrote a bad poem, and it soured up my Monday, which is impressive considering that Mondays are sour to begin with.  At this point, I think there’s something inherent in Monday as a day that makes it terrible – it’s not the day after Sunday that’s a downer, it’s Monday, and if we got rid of it we’d be one step closer to ending all violence and trauma.  Anyways, I thought it’d be a good idea to get out my pain from that poem and write about writing.

Despite my rather consistent declarations since 11th grade that I wanted to be a writer, I’ve done relatively little actual writing during that time.  In fact, I think I’ve done most of my writing during 9th and 10th grade.  During that time, I began writing out my philosophical ponderings in journals, writing my creative inventions on the old laptop my Uncle gave me.  I would start a night’s worth of writing by just writing about anything – my day, a movie a saw, how I had nothing to write about – and then when I felt that that was enough, when everything was off of my chest, I’d delete that and open up whatever short story I was working on at the time.  I can’t remember exactly how this procedure came about, but it worked – I still have the 137 page story I wrote, written in single-spaced (so 274 double-spaced approximately).  It might not be good, and is riddled with plot holes since I basically invented the plot as I went along, but it’s something, a chunk of text I could theoretically edit into something readible in the future.

Then I went through a dry spell – I didn’t write for over 3 years.  At first, it was because my Uncle’s laptop began breaking down, and the only other computer I could write on was the family computer in our office room.  But I could never work up the nerve to go in there and write – writing was, is, a personal activity, something that begs to be done with a certain level of privacy.  You might write in a public place, but with the knowledge that hardly any of these people is going to be reading your work over your shoulder, or is going to ask, “hey, what cha writin?”  God, I hate that question.  When I finally got this laptop, however, there wasn’t really any excuse for not writing anymore.  Writing was that thing I wanted to do – eventually, in the future, when I was ready, whatever that word means.  Every few months I’d write the first page or so of a story, then never look at it again.  The funny thing was, I kept thinking of myself as a writer, putting down all the story ideas that came to me, writing out all the poems I thought up.  But eventually I stopped even those poems, and my only excuse was that I hadn’t read enough yet.

Thanks to the creative writing classes I’ve taken, and a bit of a quarter-life crisis (that probably isn’t completely done with me yet), I began writing again, trying to get something down every night (although usually failing this on the weekends, when hanging out gets in the way).  Sometimes I tend more towards poetry, sometimes towards fiction, but I try to work on something at least.  Thanks to those millions of unfinished stories I started, I make a policy with myself to not start a new story until I’m finished with the one I’m working on.  It’s difficult sometimes, and I don’t always follow this through – sometimes stories just wind up too complicated and need more time than I can give at the moment – but it helps a lot.

The strange thing about writing is that I love doing it, but I hate doing it.  There’s a Dorothy Parker quote: “I hate writing, I love to have written.”  That’s part of the sentiment, but it’s more complicated than that.  Sometimes I might look forward to the time I have saved for writing.  I’ll take a shower, write in my journal, anticipating the moments when I can get to work on my story.  And then the time comes, and I find that I just have to listen to another song on iTunes, although I’m not sure which one, so I should go through the entire library and see which would be the best prep song before getting to work, and that’s never the right one, so I have to try a few more before I can really start writing.  If I plan to start writing at midnight, I’ll start writing by 1, or 2, depending on if it’s a good day or not.

If I think about my writing process, though, I find every instance filled with pleasure – conceiving of an interesting idea, letting it work out on the page, editing it into a finer piece.  The hardest part is simply building up the motivation to write.  It’s like taking the leap to bungie jump, or asking someone out on a date – to do it takes a blind moment’s action, jumping forward before you can distract yourself from the task at hand.  I have problems asking girls out, and I doubt I’ll ever bungie jump, but I can will myself to write.  The trick is to force yourself to get started, no matter what – once you’re there, you’re fine, you’re in a good place, you might look at the clock and frown that so much time has passed, you’ll want more time to write!  But getting started is the torture of it all.

I think, not just with writing, but with many things in life, we hate the things we love.  There are things that we live for, things that we couldn’t imagine not doing, and yet finding it difficult to do them.  That is where habit and ritual comes in.  The thing about these things is that they’re easy not to do – it’s nice to think of doing them, but actually doing them requires, well, actually doing something.  The key is to force yourself to do them.  My belief is create a solid and consistent ritual, a time everyday to do that activity, same time everyday, and preferably a time that won’t likely be disturbed.  For instance, I write at night, which doesn’t do well if I hang out with friends very late and come home tired and a bit buzzed.  Just the act of doing something over and over again brings up the expectation of it.  It’s not, “oh, I’ll try writing tonight,” it’s, “well perhaps I’ll read for a bit, watch some TV…until 11 of course, when I write.”

If you have a bad day and don’t feel like writing, perhaps just write about your bad day.  Or write about a memory, or about the book you’re reading, or how Shirley next door looked a bit more stunning than usual today.  Just write, and you might find that, in the middle of your writing about nothing in particular, you’ll want to write about something in particular.  At the very least, you’ll still be writing – ritual preserved!

The great thing about ritual is that it reminds you everyday why you love doing what it is you do.  As my hour of writing grows close, I begin to feel the nervous itch about it, and start randomly surfing the internet to avoid it.  But I always get to it eventually, and that cold plunge reminds me how warm writing can actually be.  So if there’s something you love doing, but hate to do it, force yourself!  Force yourself everyday, force yourself mercilessly, and sooner rather than later you’ll find that it’s just a part of life now, like showering, or morning coffee.  Okay, it’s true, I haven’t written any poems since my bad poem day on Monday, but I’ve been writing a short story, and that’s close enough.  Do what you love to do everyday, even if you hate it, and you’ll always remember why you love it.

Everyone Needs an Editor

Recently I’ve been reading a book of conversations between Michael Ondaatje (who wrote The English Patient and Anil’s Ghost) and Walter Murch (who edited all of the Godfather movies, along with Apocalypse Now Redux and the movie adaptation of The English Patient – the list of classic movies goes on).  Since Murch is the kind of guy who dabbles in almost everything, the conversations branch out into a lot of different areas, many of which pertaining to art.  One of his views on how movies are made is that they go work out one of two possible ways:

1.) A movie is the director’s vision, and the process of making a movie is getting from that vision to the end of its production with as little changes and modifications and possible, so as to keep that vision intact.

2.) (The one I probably agree with more) A movie is a collaboration among the entire cast and crew, and though there needs to be the stability of both the script and the director’s guidelines, the process of making the film (in all forms – preproduction, shooting, editing) allows each person involved to make small individual contributions that ultimately shape the film.

I agree with this mostly because it’s inevitable, especially with film, but with other forms of art as well.  Of course some filmmakers create movies with a very strict form and style – you watch a Wes Anderson film for a minute and you know who directed it.  But you can’t make the same movie over and over – eventually the formula gets stale and predictable, and as an artist, one has to be willing to experiment, to leave comfort zones and explore new methods of storytelling and new conflicts to investigate.  And part of that involves letting your crew in on your film.  Your DP is gonna influence the way your film looks, just as your editor will influece how it flows together, so a director might as well allow their input and see what becomes of it – the results can be, and usually are, greater than what you’re original idea was.

One of the biggest problems of being an artist isn’t writer’s block or getting your big break.  It’s being too close to your material, getting so absorbed in an idea that you can’t see where it’s gone off-track, or where it can be improved or complicated.  In The Kite Runner (book, not movie), when the main character begins writing as a kid, one of his stories has a huge plot-hole, which he doesn’t even think of until his best friend points it out.  One of my first short stories was a horror story about a boy who suddenly starts seeing strange creatures out of the corner of his eyes, but the story itself included a few red herrings and a rushed and contrived ending.  I wrote the story for a horror story contest at a nearby library, and had my Mom read it over once before sending it in.  She told me all the things that were wrong with it, but I wasn’t looking to be edited content-wise – I just wanted to know where to fix up grammar or misspellings, and I ignored the actually helpful comments.  Naturally, I didn’t win.

In a way, there’s no such thing as the individual artist.  One reads a good book or see a good film and imagines, “Wow, one person alone wrote this book, one person made this movie.”  It’s more apparent with movies – of course not one person made it!  There was a huge crew working on it everyday, not to mention the writer who provided the material to work with in the first place.  And at every step of the way, someone is contributing extremely valuable insight that could make or break the movie – no one man could do it all by himself, nor should he try, since many films are made all the more interesting by the incidental input of the crew.  With literature, an author might be closer to the source material since he comes up with the idea and writes it all, but he’s hardly the sole sculptor of the final work.  Every writer needs an editor to fix things up, point the eye to confusing plot-lines or melodramatic characters.  And this doesn’t even include all the influences the writer had while working on the book.  You might do some research on a particular job for the character, discover things you didn’t know before that add some depth to the story, or you might be talking with a friend over coffee and realize some perfect device to use for that chapter you were struggling with.  And those are only benefits – imagine how destitute and sheltered a plot would be, written only in a lonely cabin in the woods, with nothing but one perspective guiding it all.

No work of art is perfect, as no artist is perfect.  Every artist needs a second opinion, a crew, an editor, if only to complicate the artist’s life further with some viewpoint he hadn’t considered, some extra idea that’s just too interesting to leave out.  It’s impossible to derail a good story with outside influences – the complications just make it better.