He’s boring
Why is he boring?
What can I do to make it not boring?
More feeling, more thoughts
perhaps a look back every now and again
More what he sees, smell, feel at the sight of all that blood
all the death.
It’s all new to him
He feels they are shouting ‘at’ him because he isn’t shouting ‘with’ them
even though that’s certainly not true.
My place is my pleasure dome, I don’t know when it became like that because I used to get a lot done when I moved in. I was scared back then, I quit my job, got fired from another after a month and I lived on unemployment benefit – I was losing money every month. I wrote because I knew I wanted to write and I wrote furiously, all day, I think. Then I got comfortable and all that stopped. I guess I managed to do some writing at work which maybe is the reason why my place became the pleasure dome. I needed some place to unvine from work.
All creatives need a place to work. My day job became that place so I guess I should consider myself fortunate. That’s not the case anymore, though. The good times are over and I’m back into uncertainty. It’s hard work and I got no writing place anymore.
I guess the bar became my new writing place for a while. I got a lot done down there because the place was mostly empty in the afternoon. And I drank slowly so I didn’t get smashed. I’m in the midst of trying to make my place my work place again. I tucked a chair in the corner – really stretching the limits what I can do in my small apartment.
It’s working, I think. I’m writing there now and at the very least I read. I crave to sit down on that chair and read on my free days, which is a good feeling, and when I read I get inspired to write so it’s working out well so far. As long as I write I don’t drink or smoke. I sometimes take out the pipe while I read and pretend that I’m Gandalf of Tolkien or something, it just feels right doing. I have a beer sometimes too but it’s different from doing it at a bar. I got a romanticized picture about drinking and writing after reading everything from Bukowski and it is nice, doing the thing he mostly writes about.
Getting the story started is easy, keeping it going, in a sensible way, is not. I don’t agree with the idea that one should just write no matter what comes out. Shit is shit. It’s better to take a step back and come back later or the next day. It’s far harder to fix shit than it is writing something new. Of course, everything turns to shit anyway until it’s done. Beginnings are easy because they don’t have to make a lot of sense. At least I try not to think too much about it. At some point I gotta stop and consider where I’m heading with the story but I try to stay free for as long as I can. It’s far more exciting to discover what happens when I don’t have a structure yet. Tidying up later is, as I said, the hard part because of that.
Sense thinking and non thinking have such different approaches I think it’s a good idea to keep these state of minds far apart and don’t try to mix them. Finish the first draft freely then maybe consider start tidying up. It’s all about divided attention. Then there’s another state of mind that I often get confused with is the editing part. It’s damn near impossible not to edit as I go but that means a lot of unnecessary work because I edit bits that won’t even make the cut or get changed. It’s very intrusive.
To relinquish control is always a good idea as an artist so maybe writing long hand or on a typewriter is a good idea, at least on the first draft because I won’t get the opportunity to edit. I want to streamline my process as far as I can so that I don’t waste any more time and I don’t mean it so I can finish something faster, I mean literally cutting out doing something useless and unnecessary. I’ll always take my time to make a good story, though.
Don’t look back and don’t look ahead, that’s the way to write unhinged. I got plenty of time to consider what I’ve done afterwards.
I have a very grim out look on writing, not defeatist, mind you, but my aim is to understand what I do which is probably part of the problem. It’s an impossibility, you can’t understand how your mind works, you can only analyse other’s work and hope that their work will rub off on you somehow.
Writing gives you a plethora of problems if you think of it as problems. And really, all you can do is ask the questions and hope they’ll have answers eventually, you can’t figure it out, not if you’re like me.
And that’s not even the end of it. The answers will evolve and merge and be consumed by other questions until you have a grey brownish blob instead of the colorful puzzle that you had in your mind. And you know what? It’s beautiful because it’s real, it’s not a fantasy in your head.
It’s important that you keep trying but also know when to stop. There are pitfalls, unfortunately, and although you can dig yourself out of them, it’s probably better to just climb out, but what’s the fun in that? We like challenges, that’s part of the reason why we became writers, right?
All these ‘problems’ are compounded a thousandfold when you try to tackle longer works. It still boggles my mind that anyone could casually approach a story and believe they’ll have a finished book by the end of it, because of course the book is never good enough. The amount of editing is staggering! It’s not fun, at least it’s exhausting and you’ll run out of steam eventually, if you’re anything like me, you enjoy the discovery, editing for others to enjoy is secondary.
Is it satisfying finishing a manuscript? I wouldn’t know, I’m just looking forward to get it off my hands and start the new project, naively heading into the mist hoping the results will be different next time and you know what? I’m sure they will, because writing hardness you, you do understand more but every new project is a different beast and you better handle it with care unless you want to come out of it with half a mind.
No matter what I do, I want to be somewhere else.
It doesn’t matter if I watch a movie, write or draw, my mind like to take me to places. Even in my sleep I just want the quiet part to happen. I’m drained when I wake up and can’t write – won’t write! I take a walk instead, a long one. The mind begins to empty and fill up again with funny stories because I’m bored. It’s the best to be bored. Sometimes I amuse myself by going down a strange path, into an alley and find a quirky looking tower from the last century or something or a driveway with a lot of junk on it that tickles my imagination and a story takes form about the person that lives there. The stories are endless but making them understandable for you guys is the biggest drag in the world!
It’s only in books that I find some sort of peace. My head keeps shouting but the words I read drown them out, partly, sometimes totally. They just won’t shut up and I’m too scared to tell them to. The things in my head might be better than real life, after all, otherwise I wouldn’t be bored to begin with.
It’s summer and it’s hot. The sun glared through the blinds of the window, creeping in like a pervert insisting on making my blood boil. The blanket underneath me was cool until I had to flip it over to make it cool again. The ceiling was plain grey and it was nothing to look at but it allowed my mind to wander. My body was soon soaked by the heat, I was doing a good job feeding the microbes that live in the bedsheets but I didn’t notice it.
My thoughts thrashed around, making a mess in my head, my thoughts often running into each other and making weird thought babies. Sometimes I write them down, birthing them into existence – I had to, otherwise they would cry and I would not know peace for a while.
I try to jot them down because they simmer at the surface of my consciousness for a long time and if I don’t pick them up they’ll sink deeper until I can’t get them and I would never be able to get them out again. They get stuck down there, merging with the doubt and fears until they are an intangible mess. Someday my head will get full of those thoughts and I won’t be able to think straight again.
Why do we think so much?
Often I find myself giving up and
I want to do something brainlessly
like doing the dishes
Driving is also a favorite
When you drive you look at things and can’t do shit
your brain can’t be hijacked by some intrusive thought
something you have to do.
Imagine being a woodcutter
or painting fences for a living
it must be bliss.
What’s the cause of this malfunction?
are all humans born a little broken?
or do we break bit by bit as we grow up?
life’s hard
When you try to figure it out
You hate waking up in the morning
If sitting behind the computer makes you puke
If you prefer drinking over eating
If you are alone
If you are alone
if you are alone
if you hate standing in line
if you rather huff paint than work
if you take too long on the john
if you refer to the toilet as the ‘john’
if you think you’re god
then everyone should listen to you
And do what you do.
The elbow of my shirt broke and I was very sad.
It was my favorite one and I got a lot of compliments because of it.
I also have some t-shirts that are basically rags
nobody have seen those
but I keep them
odd socks too
but not underwear.
Don’t want my cock falling out, suddenly.
Other than the underwear, I don’t really care much
at least I’d like to think that I don’t
still, when it get noticeable, I guess I do.
Ideas are like floods, unrelenting
you can’t get out of them
no matter how hard you try
A stream of thoughts, on the other hand
is easier.
And feelings… they need to come out violently
like vomit on a page.
that’s how it’s supposed to be.
the sickness is always
more
powerful than
the thought.
The Horrors of Writing 