here are today's 755 words...
Jul. 18th, 2010 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluecastleI mostly don't talk about how empathetic I am. Which is partly because I don't have the words to talk about feelings and emotions, and partly because saying I "sense" things about people sounds like a lot of hooey bunkum. I actually try not to explain it. All I know is that in any interaction with people, I always get a sense of what's going on behind what they are saying and doing. Well, okay frequently, not always. And who knows, maybe I'm just really good at reading non-verbal clues. Except I often sense things behind peoples written words too.
Without testing these things, which I have no desire to do, I have no idea whether I'm just kidding myself about all this or not. But whatever. Like I said, I try not to analyze it too much.
It just becomes a pain when I am always buffeted around by the feelings swirling around me and I end up feeling the things other people are feeling, and if you do that for years on end it becomes really hard for me to distinguish what MY actual feelings are on anything.
{of course all this is rolled up in a complicated family burrito where the feelings and wishes of my mother were/are the only ones that count and so things always have to be done to her satisfaction or ELSE. Which doesn't help with anything.}
Not sure why this is at the forefront of my brain today. I've been reading a book about writing, and I've been writing SOMETHING ... usually just bitching about HAVING to write :D ... for 27 straight days now. But there are 5,000 odd words of STUFF relating to the longfic. Scenes, bits of dialogue, descriptions ... I have a basic plan/outline for the story but forcing myself in this heat and humidity to sit down every day and crawl inside the mind of people who are either psychotic (in the case of the serial killer that kicks the story off) or angst-ridden in the case of my other two characters is wearing on me.
The good days are great. The bad days suck. I gather that this is the life of someone who writes.
I think of Helene Hanff (she of 84 Charing Cross Road fame, amongst her other books) ... she of the reader/writer/literary fangirl club ... who drank a lot more gin than me, but used to write for television, so she was doing something right in her cold water walk-up in NYC. Reading Greek myths and Samuel Pepys and the Bible in Latin and then turning them into Ellery Queen scripts.
I will never be that literary ... in the classical old dead white guy sense.
But here I am at my computer every day for nearly a month now, pounding out at least 750 words. Taking the thoughts in my head and trying to corral them into something. Into SOMETHING.
Creative alchemy.
I love the imagery of phoenixes. I want a stuffed Fawkes to perch over my writing desk. To look up at and remind myself every day that it's about showing up over and over and over again.
I have not been very good about that kind of dedication to anything. I had a year each of tap and ballet when I was small. Never practiced enough. I did seven years in the school band and was always in the middle of the pack, because I didn't care enough to practice enough.
I still don't know what I do care about most days. I'm generally wading through the morass of my mind, and trying to solve bigger questions like whether I feel like butter or peanut butter on my toast.
But I'm still here. Today. In front of my computer. With a hundred more words to go for today.
So here I sit, trying to link up people who live lives underground but who come up into the "real" world because they have to, because they're drawn to a world that doesn't really accept their existence. They come because that other world gives them a doorway into their own lives ... and isn't that what we do every time we sit down in front of our laptops, or pick up a pen and start to tell stories?
I don't know if any of this makes sense, but there's a nugget of something there that I suspect I will spend the next six weeks, or a lifetime trying to chase down. And that's me, for today.
Without testing these things, which I have no desire to do, I have no idea whether I'm just kidding myself about all this or not. But whatever. Like I said, I try not to analyze it too much.
It just becomes a pain when I am always buffeted around by the feelings swirling around me and I end up feeling the things other people are feeling, and if you do that for years on end it becomes really hard for me to distinguish what MY actual feelings are on anything.
{of course all this is rolled up in a complicated family burrito where the feelings and wishes of my mother were/are the only ones that count and so things always have to be done to her satisfaction or ELSE. Which doesn't help with anything.}
Not sure why this is at the forefront of my brain today. I've been reading a book about writing, and I've been writing SOMETHING ... usually just bitching about HAVING to write :D ... for 27 straight days now. But there are 5,000 odd words of STUFF relating to the longfic. Scenes, bits of dialogue, descriptions ... I have a basic plan/outline for the story but forcing myself in this heat and humidity to sit down every day and crawl inside the mind of people who are either psychotic (in the case of the serial killer that kicks the story off) or angst-ridden in the case of my other two characters is wearing on me.
The good days are great. The bad days suck. I gather that this is the life of someone who writes.
I think of Helene Hanff (she of 84 Charing Cross Road fame, amongst her other books) ... she of the reader/writer/literary fangirl club ... who drank a lot more gin than me, but used to write for television, so she was doing something right in her cold water walk-up in NYC. Reading Greek myths and Samuel Pepys and the Bible in Latin and then turning them into Ellery Queen scripts.
I will never be that literary ... in the classical old dead white guy sense.
But here I am at my computer every day for nearly a month now, pounding out at least 750 words. Taking the thoughts in my head and trying to corral them into something. Into SOMETHING.
Creative alchemy.
I love the imagery of phoenixes. I want a stuffed Fawkes to perch over my writing desk. To look up at and remind myself every day that it's about showing up over and over and over again.
I have not been very good about that kind of dedication to anything. I had a year each of tap and ballet when I was small. Never practiced enough. I did seven years in the school band and was always in the middle of the pack, because I didn't care enough to practice enough.
I still don't know what I do care about most days. I'm generally wading through the morass of my mind, and trying to solve bigger questions like whether I feel like butter or peanut butter on my toast.
But I'm still here. Today. In front of my computer. With a hundred more words to go for today.
So here I sit, trying to link up people who live lives underground but who come up into the "real" world because they have to, because they're drawn to a world that doesn't really accept their existence. They come because that other world gives them a doorway into their own lives ... and isn't that what we do every time we sit down in front of our laptops, or pick up a pen and start to tell stories?
I don't know if any of this makes sense, but there's a nugget of something there that I suspect I will spend the next six weeks, or a lifetime trying to chase down. And that's me, for today.
