Today I had the idea to do this thing, this writing thing, the thing that I'm doing right now. I was not so much sitting or lying down, but maybe a fair way to give a quick description of my position would be to say that I was in a position halfway between the two. I was on my knees, knelt at the side of my bed with my head and the upper part of my torso slumped across my mattress in a sort of groaning-prayer position. I had my eyes closed, and it's likely that my mouth was openly drooling. One of my books was in front of me with the title 'Retelling Something Daily' scrawled hurriedly on to the top of a new page – I was looking for something to write about. The idea had come to me tentatively as I was reading Catch-22 – well I wasn't so much reading it as I was looking at the words for the first two paragraphs of chapter eleven, I can tell when I'm not actually reading something because I start to get mental images of things that have nothing to do with what I'm pretending to be taking in.
Anyway, that's neither here nor there is it? No. I had the idea to write about something every day – some episode or story or happening or just something interesting that I can retell in a chronological way so that I might practice pure storytelling and focus my style away from pretentious, stream-of-consciousness ramblings on random, disconnected topics. I keep giving myself excuses to continue with the patterns of writing that I find easy: 'stay true to yourself', 'genius is often misunderstood', 'develop your own unique style'. These petty reaffirmations are useless and will only serve to distance me further from any potential development. I need to push myself. Pressure. Focus. Force. Words. Do not become comfortable.
So
I wrote down 'Today I had the idea of doing this' on the first line
of the page. I wrote it just under the heading that I'd scrawled
quickly before dumping my face on the bed in a tantrum of
self-defeating exhaustion. I went back to reading with a bit more
focus, and with a reasonable confidence that in around half an hour
or so I would embark on the first of what will hopefully be many
quick retellings of odd, daily events. “Do one thing, every day,
that scares you” – I am scared of writing drivel, and as far as I
can see, the day-to-day life of a barely employed twenty-one year old
contains nothing but, so here we go. I am afraid.
Peace,
Taco.
No comments:
Post a Comment