There’s always something shitty about word vomits when I try to complete incomplete ones. There’s this looming sense of “I should try to finish what I started”, but that’s rarely possible. If I quit in the middle of a mood while writing, that mood’s usually gone, irreplaceable. If I finish an entire session of writing, I can then edit and play around with whatever is already written, but it’s very hard to write what I had in mind if I no longer have the right state. It’s a very interesting thing, and one I’d like to explore further in the future. [1]
I make no apologies for repeating myself. For the rest of this word vomit project, let it be known that I will often repeat myself. [2] Here’s the current thought that I want to repeat: I’ve been grasping at straws for some time, not knowing what exactly I stand for anymore, what exactly I care for anymore. I think I wrote a sort of manifesto or declaration of purpose a few vomits ago– fuck fear was probably it, or I need to carve out a space for me or something like that. Big, broad, general abstract sorta strokes, I’m sure they were. [3] But I want to think about the role and purpose of writing.
At some point in my life I wanted to be a published writer of some sort. As a child I think I might’ve thought that I would’ve wanted to write books, like Enid Blyton or Philip Pullman or Susan Cooper. At some point I got fascinated with Egypt and Space and Volcanoes and Earthquakes and all those sort of cool things, and I thought maybe I might become some sort of scientist or science writer, perhaps like Carl Zimmer or Lewis Thomas. Then I discovered magazines, and I thought I’d like to be a magazine writer, like maybe Tom Chiarella from Esquire. I discovered the Internet at some point, and thought I might like to be a blogger or journalist of some kind. I’ve just always liked words. I find it extra-pleasing when people use words with the original intent intact– like how decimate has its roots in the Roman military punishment of having a unit kill one tenth of its own, or how ravishing is about rape, and how for something to be truly tantalizing it has to be barely out of reach. Things like that. There are all this lovely little details in language and I get frustrated when people don’t put in the necessary attention to said details.
I realize this is something that’s true about me. I’m pathological about words, sentences, paragraphs. This is still true for me. It’s not entirely true within the context of this project, because part of the point of this project is to get me to create in such large volumes that I am able to rip myself away from the little details (in practice) and see the bigger picture. I can still take any particular vomit (and I seriously contemplated and continue to contemplate doing this) and rewrite it a hundred times, condensing it into its most base constituents. But I’m not sure how valuable that will be. Mostly I want to get to the end of this and read it and see what I still find interesting. And then I’ll expand on that. I think I might write short stories. I might like to publish novels in the future. I’ve never met a novel that I thought was utterly perfect– every single one has me thinking, “That’s mostly nice but I would do X differently.” So it’s clear that I have to be a writer. I might not necessarily write for a living but I have to be a writer. I once wrote a short story about a boy and his wolf puppies that had me in tears while I was writing it. It’s not edited, so it’s still quite a slovenly piece of prose, but I was crying because of what it represented to me. And I feel like a lot of what I’m doing in these vomits is trying to intellectualize what I’m thinking about. As I get better at writing without thinking, it might make sense to avoid trying to describe things in essays, and instead describe them in stories. We’ll see how that goes. But the point is that it has to keep on going. I think I could be top 1% in the world at this. I can imagine reading thousands of books in my lifetime, the idea seems pleasurable.
So I should pursue this. I should keep writing. I should start writing little short stories. Maybe I should already have started writing short stories into my word vomits by now– I think I haven’t maybe because it might require a little more effort than I’m bothered with right now. But I wrote about the wolf-puppies despite that. Maybe I need to re-read Bradbury. But no matter, I will write. It is my passion and vocation and I see that clearly now. I will write even if nobody else ever cares.
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[1] I’m reminded of Jay Griffiths’ writing in A Sideways Look At Time, where she wrote very differently for different chapters– writing from different locations, and even writing an entire chapter exclusively while she was on her period.
[2] I will most often do it with the sense of “I’m pretty sure I’ve said this before”. Sometimes I’ll know for sure, and sometimes I won’t know at all. But this recurring feeling I have that I need to somehow voice out, “Hey, I’m repeating myself!” is itself getting overly repetitive. It’s fine to repeat myself, it’s annoying to repeat that I’m repeating myself. So let’s cut this off here.
[3] A third thing– I’m often writing these vomits without looking back. I feel self conscious of the fact that I’m not really looking back. I do feel like I ought to re-read my old vomits by now, so that at least when I write, I write with the weight of knowing what I’ve written. Well– I’m in two minds about this. The first and most important thing is that I keep writing.