Max: Random Babblings of a Dangerous Lunatic
It is Wednesday. My day off. My weekend has been Wednesday and Thursday for the past 8 months. Saturday and Sunday are big days in retail sales. Peons like me have to man the stores so zombies like you can entertain yourselves by spending money.
My point? None. I am babbling. Stream of consciousness. From my brain to Blogger's interface to your screen. I have lost a certain sense of play with my writing. It is one reason why I don't write much. I am not as able as I once was to put myself in a self manufactured fantasy and belch it out into my word processor. The problem I had when I was able to do that more easily was that I didn't know how to write well. I had a vague idea of good writing. But the mechanics of a well crafted story I had not mastered. That mafe my writing uneven at best. I still have yet to master it. But I am better. Not that I am even slightly concerned about mechanices at this point. It is something I have to work on. But I also need to light and keep lit my creative pilot light. If I could somehow find a way to reawaken the screaming mad savage that lives under my medula, plug his mad rantings into a high speed linguistic mechanics processor, I may just earn myself the right to call myself a writer.
That is my goal. To put pure imagination, coupled with immediate passion, fully integrated with an ingrained sense of language to work on the page. Instead of endless revisions of poorly put together crap, I could put out almost passible work on the first draft, with only one or two further iterations and a couple week's of revision between unfiltered brain dumpings and readable product.
More than anything, that takes practice and study. Every day I read a passage from Strunk & White's Elements of Style. I will continue to do that until I have the book memorized, then I will start over and keep doing it until it is fully internalized, then I will do it again. At the same time, I need to do things like this, exercises in making my brain think about writing. I need to make writing instinctive, my primary mode of communication. Talk is cheap. A well written body of work is imortality. And I need to reawaken my imagination. I used to be a compulsive day-dreamer. I can't tell you the number of people who thought I was pissed off at them because I walked right past them on campus without acknoledging their greetings. It wasn't that I was pissed. It was rather that I was not there. My body was on automatic pilot, taking me from class to class. My brain was in another world, some day-dream or another. That doesn't happen so much anymore.
I need to shut off the TV. It crowd out my own imagination. There, it's off. It won't stay off. I like TV. But I need to watch it less, make time for my brain to think without interference. Maybe if I started walking more. I used to do some of my best fantasizing when walking. It could use the exercise. And now my wife has one more thing she can throw in my face when trying to get me to walk more.
How much have I written? Don't know, don't care. What does it mean? Nothing. I'm just clearing a little piece of mental ground where hopefully I will be able to soon start a mental bonfire, one that will rage out of control and consume me to the point when I will have either have to set the page on fire or let my head explode.
My point? None. I am babbling. Stream of consciousness. From my brain to Blogger's interface to your screen. I have lost a certain sense of play with my writing. It is one reason why I don't write much. I am not as able as I once was to put myself in a self manufactured fantasy and belch it out into my word processor. The problem I had when I was able to do that more easily was that I didn't know how to write well. I had a vague idea of good writing. But the mechanics of a well crafted story I had not mastered. That mafe my writing uneven at best. I still have yet to master it. But I am better. Not that I am even slightly concerned about mechanices at this point. It is something I have to work on. But I also need to light and keep lit my creative pilot light. If I could somehow find a way to reawaken the screaming mad savage that lives under my medula, plug his mad rantings into a high speed linguistic mechanics processor, I may just earn myself the right to call myself a writer.
That is my goal. To put pure imagination, coupled with immediate passion, fully integrated with an ingrained sense of language to work on the page. Instead of endless revisions of poorly put together crap, I could put out almost passible work on the first draft, with only one or two further iterations and a couple week's of revision between unfiltered brain dumpings and readable product.
More than anything, that takes practice and study. Every day I read a passage from Strunk & White's Elements of Style. I will continue to do that until I have the book memorized, then I will start over and keep doing it until it is fully internalized, then I will do it again. At the same time, I need to do things like this, exercises in making my brain think about writing. I need to make writing instinctive, my primary mode of communication. Talk is cheap. A well written body of work is imortality. And I need to reawaken my imagination. I used to be a compulsive day-dreamer. I can't tell you the number of people who thought I was pissed off at them because I walked right past them on campus without acknoledging their greetings. It wasn't that I was pissed. It was rather that I was not there. My body was on automatic pilot, taking me from class to class. My brain was in another world, some day-dream or another. That doesn't happen so much anymore.
I need to shut off the TV. It crowd out my own imagination. There, it's off. It won't stay off. I like TV. But I need to watch it less, make time for my brain to think without interference. Maybe if I started walking more. I used to do some of my best fantasizing when walking. It could use the exercise. And now my wife has one more thing she can throw in my face when trying to get me to walk more.
How much have I written? Don't know, don't care. What does it mean? Nothing. I'm just clearing a little piece of mental ground where hopefully I will be able to soon start a mental bonfire, one that will rage out of control and consume me to the point when I will have either have to set the page on fire or let my head explode.
posted by Max Dobberstein at 10/08/2003 05:33:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home