Warning: This is a meaningless stream of consciousness writing. There is no point within this and no great truth lies at the other end. You have been warned.
Writing is a horrible, horrible existence. I’m into another period where I’ve convinced myself that I’m not actually a writer. Genuine writers are compelled to write, have ceaselessly wandering imaginations, and most of all, actually produce pages with some regularity. Lately, I feel like I’m 0 for 3. And of all the half formed ideas and potentialities I have been compelled to scribble down by my ceaselessly wandering imagination, none ever seem to make the leap into produced pages.
Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m still thoroughly jobless and completely out of money, relying upon the continuing but strained generosity of my mother. With a sizable To Do list but no obligations tied to specific appointments or even more generally, the outside world, with all the freedom of the day to write, I find it enormously difficult to focus my efforts on what I want to accomplish.
I feel like I can’t even make my point, regardless of the nature of the writing I’m doing. I just wander and ramble, stringing things together, hop scotching from one occasionally nicely worded idea to the next. Ideas are wonderful, but they need sequencing, they need order and structure to convey accomplish their ultimate mission, which is to affect the reader. And somewhere in the middle of that forest of words, I get lost, get frustrated, give up, and return to reloading my Twitter page.
Argh. I have been working on continuing development of the writer’s technique I learned in the screenwriting class I took earlier this year. And no doubt that class and its technique made the draft of the webseries script better by tenfold. Though the script still isn’t perfect, still needs one last polish in a spot or two. I think it’s an adage of writing, though it probably applies to much more of life, that the first 90% takes 10% of the work and the last 10% takes 90% of the work. That certainly feels the case here, where the last 2-5% seems to be a more Herculean task than all that’s come before, though in reality that’s probably just me feeling sorry for myself.
I think more and more often that I need a writing partner, a genuine soul mate of the page that would surely level these impediments and let my genius flow forth unblocked once and for all, washing away the old order of the corrupt and evil world with the brilliance of my ideas and talent. Though pegging a writing partner as the key missing ingredient in so egotistical a construction is, of course, laughably absurd.
Then, of course, there’s also this kind of divided opinion I have about my own writing style, at least when it comes to non narrative writing, which so often keeps me from writing blog posts. On the one hand, I think it’s pretty damn good prose, flowing and articulate, even if it’s sometimes wandering, muddled, and a little comma-happy. But on the other, it pegs me as a pretentious asshole, which of course, I am. But I don’t want to be. I hate pretension and I hate hypocrisy even more. And there’s nothing worse than being a hypocritically pretentious asshole who thinks he’s the shit but can’t even produce a decent blog post, let alone an actual script from start to finish and thinks his only problem is he doesn’t have a writing partner to fix all his mistakes and do all the work for him but thinks he’s some fantastic writer anyway even though he’s rambling and confusing and not all that clever anyway, even in vocabulary (seriously, “pegs” twice in the same blog post?).
But I don’t have a choice (right?). What else would I do? Where else would I go? I genuinely can’t picture any alternatives. No day job I could take and be satisfied with, despite my obsession with politics (DailyKos and Talking Points Memo being refreshed as often as Twitter) and my desire to teach someday (I have to understand something well enough to teach it, first).
So this was a complete stream of consciousness, as it turns out. That’s fine. At least they’re words, that’s something more than the lately usual. And even though this was procrastination – from rewriting the webseries draft, from looking for a job – at least I was writing.
Now if I can just produce some pages.
I need a job.