Writing about writing

October 9th 2018

Just looking for some answers,
In a world that answers none of them at all
         - On the Bright Side, Never Shout Never

I managed to drag myself off to the doctor yesterday, which turned out to be a good thing, because I have some sort of inner ear infection (actually I’m not sure if that’s what it’s called, I only know the Danish word for it, but it’s got something to do with my ear). This affects my balance, a lot, so I have to expect to be lying down a lot more than I care for, as I can get dizzy from just sitting in front of the computer, looking at words. This – I think – is the most annoying type of sickness I have had, in regards to working on my writing. The ideas are there, the abilities are there, I just can’t keep my eyes focused because the entire world starts to sway and wobble. Yesterday I spent three hours at least, just lying in my bed, wide awake and incapable of doing anything besides just lie there. I would try to imagine up scenes and quotes and all that kind of things, but just grabbing a hold of the post it pad and writing notes, seemed like an almost impossible task.

That being said, I feel slightly better right now. It comes and goes really, so for now I’m trying to get some work out of the way, while it’s not too awful.

I did get some notes done yesterday, in spite of this, which was quite amazing actually, because I think I’ve finally made some actual decisions. That has always been one of my great planning problems, when I start off with a completely new and fresh project, there are simply too many options on how to write it. 1st or 3rd person? Past or present tense? How should the story evolve? What kind of information is relevant? Could this be edited out from the very beginning? Who tells the story, and why? All of this crap, just accumulates to 4137 things I need to decide upon, and it can seem really overwhelming in the beginning. Point is, I think I managed to do some of that yesterday, and my to-do list is slowly shrinking in size. Still a long way to go, but it seems doable now, it seems realistic that I will get this done before November.

Lately – that meaning for the last thirty seconds – I have been wondering why I write the type of things I do. It came up in a conversation between me and an old friend, he was curious as to what I was working on, so I told him about the NaNoWriMo, and what I intend to write about (if I ever get these god damned notes to do what I want them to). He was… Well, he was a little surprised actually, I’m not one of those people who talk a lot about what I’m working on, I write a lot of stupid blog posts about it, sure, but sharing with friends I actually know in real life happens maybe once a century.

It’s always pretty depressing stuff, I’m a sucker for great tragedy, both in my own writing but also in other people’s stuff. Some of my all time favorite movies are “The Fountain”, “Requiem for a Dream” and “V for Vendetta”. The best book I ever read is “Dream and Shadows” by Cargill, which is a pretty damn depressing piece of literature. It bleeds into my own writing as well, sometimes I think to myself: “Oh this time I’ll go for an all-round happy ending!”, and I have literally never succeeded. Not even when I was in school, writing useless papers and shit like that, I always went for the most horrible way of ending a story. I remember my teachers even being genuinely worried about me, because of it.

Ah well. Guess you can’t really go against your nature, and you shouldn’t write shit you don’t care about anyway, so I’ll just have to deal with bumming myself out, over and over again.