Ah, David Hing, I see you are writing another article about something with which you have had no experience with and are no good at. Well done. In an age of Web 2.0, general comments and having your say, you reckon stuff with the best of them.
I love writing. I love the process of writing things down. When I was growing up, I would oscillate between playing computer games for hours on end, to writing fiction for hours on end. I just loved the way that it felt like watching television or films, but with me deciding what to do. It should be noted that this was the start of my particular brand of attention-span deficiency in that I started a lot of things and finished precisely none of them. It was also the first indication that maybe a plan wasn’t such a harmful thing after all. I’m actually very thankful that I wasn’t born ten years later, because had I been, I would imagine that most of this would have leaked its way on to the internet and become public domain, lurking around in the background ready to pounce out and scuttle any sort of professional career in anything that I might want to launch…but maybe that’s just paranoia. I’m…also now wondering if carrying on this blog post is a terribly good idea.
Veering rather frighteningly away from the point, the bottom line is that I used to write things for fun. It’s not just that I enjoyed writing, it’s that I looked forward to it. I would go straight to my computer to write, just as I would occasionally go straight to my computer to carry on playing . I never had to make myself write, I never felt like I should be writing, and I never had to keep to a timetable, I just wrote things down incessantly.
Lately, I’ve been in an odd mood. Not a bad one, just an odd one. I’ve had an inability to concentrate on anything for any length of time, which although is nothing really new, it’s more that I’m able to concentrate on lots of small things at once or in quick succession to the point that nothing really gets done, and if something does get done, by the time I come back to it, it hasn’t been left in a state that I can easily decipher where I was going with it anyway. Then things quickly devolve into grossly unproductive daydreams and I’m rendered utterly useless for evenings at a time.
I’ve tried doing what a lot of people recommend and setting half an hour aside each day to write something, if only get yourself into the habit of writing every day, but I don’t think this works for me for the very reason that I never used to have to do this. I used to have to set aside half an hour a day to get away from writing, and have to work at not spending too much time typing rubbish into my computer.
I find it impossible to disconnect myself from my writing. This doesn’t mean I write lots of personal life-experience stuff into my fiction, far from it, but it does mean that if I’m in an odd mood, I don’t write, because I don’t feel like it, or if I’m in an odd mood that will lead me to writing, the writing will be equally odd. The thing that I’ve realised is that this is something I need to get out of, because if I ever want to write on a consistent and professional level, I’ve got to treat it with a consistent and professional manner.
At this point, the 8 year old within is crying out and stamping around saying that he’s right and everyone else is wrong, and that you shouldn’t plan and you should just write and enjoy it and see what happens. Maybe that little naïve idiot is right to a certain extent. Maybe by treating it too professionally would lose something or neuter it in some way. Of course, this is all pointless prattle. I’ve got no real basis for comparison: I have no finished work before relentless planning and professionalism, and seeing as I am yet to really implement any methodology of creating work with planning and professionalism, its unlikely I’ll see anything after it as well.
I’m starting to think that I don’t love writing after all. I love having written, I love creating things, or more accurately, having created things, but I don’t necessarily like the writing itself. There’s a quote from Paul Abbott on the BBC Writers Room page that flashes up a lot saying that “writing is re-writing”. I hate rewriting, which is why I don’t think I could ever be professional about writing. I think what I used to do for fun was more like an unusual way of keeping a diary. Maybe I could give all these things to my therapist-in-training girlfriend and she’d be able to tell exactly what was going on in my childhood to provoke such creations and mad scribblings.
Of course, maybe all I really liked doing was typing.
Additional Notes:
This post might be just be a very long winded way of saying “yeah, so, sorry I haven’t posted much lately…” I think I have one reader, but that readership is very important to me. I know, I could probably just tell them myself, but I’m shy and it would be awkward, and I wouldn’t want them to know that they meant THAT much to me. I have to remain at least partially aloof and mysterious.
A short while ago I actually found a load of word documents that I’d written between the ages of 8 and 16, and some of it isn’t entirely awful. I’ve even repurposed one of them for a more recent project, but that’s probably a story for another day…