Well, this is hilarious. I started on this vomit, and then I sort of got distracted and wandered off, and I ended up taking 2 full hours to complete it because I was doing so many other things in between. It was a pretty generic vomit with me just talking about how I need to sleep earlier, wake earlier, have a better morning routine, and how I’m going to use post-its on my bedroom wall to keep track of all the different things I do in a day, and figure out a fixed optimal order for doing them rather than thinking and deciding what to do each day (which is a waste of time).
It stretched out for a thousand words, and I hit publish and it just disappeared. (This is an annoying thing that WordPress does over and over again. It happened a lot on my work blog, too. Why must you kill people’s work, WordPress?)
So now I’m in a different mood. I’m avenging the vomit that was lost. And I have to figure out something else to say, and say it quickly becaus I don’t want to sleep at 2am.
I like challenges like these, I guess. I find myself thinking about the role of emotion in writing. And how if you write really fast without thinking, your writing (ideally) just becomes a reflection of whatever emotional state you’re in– or just whatever “state” you’re in, period. I was listening to Alan Watts and he was talking about how there’s some artist with long hair, who covers his hair in paint and then swings it at the canvas– and then he observes it and does a sort of Rorschach test on it, and from that he infers what the painting should be and then paints THAT. It’s an interesting way to approach constraints.
Which in turn reminds me of something Ray Bradbury said about writing down nouns… I really do think I should start writing short stories in the context of these word vomits. I’m probably hesitating because I’m a bit afraid, because I haven’t done it before. But hey, that’s the point, right? 444 vomits in and I’ve settled into this comfortable pattern of talking about my personal issues over and over again. I really ought to ban myself from writing about these things at least for a couple of hundred vomits, so that I can write other things for a change. For a period of time I was banning myself from writing social commentary type things, because those things were keeping me from paying attention to myself. Now I’ve spent like 400,000 words paying attention to myself, and it definitely feels like I’m not going to be thinking/writing my way out of this one. Rather, I have to just stay mindful of it and do more hard, challenging work.
So these word vomits shouldn’t be so easy anymore. They shouldn’t be as mindless and blurty as they are right now. I mean, they’re always going to be blurty in the sense that I’m not going to edit them very much if at all, but I’m getting really tired of just talking about myself, talking with my own voice, yadda yadda. I had a pretty good time with the A / B dialogues, but even those were pretty obviously just different facets of my own personality, or me talking to myself in the mirror. I need to try something different altogether. And so it’s probably time to dig out my list of short story ideas and stuff and just get cracking.
Since I still have more time in this vomit I’ll spend it thinking about how I’ll pick what to write. I feel like I have some sort of burden or responsibility to write about things that aren’t trivial. I don’t want to be writing the same sort of essays that I used to write for Poached Magazine.
Well… technically I can start by writing about trivial things if I want to. But do I actually want to? This is a silly, pointless train of thought. I am in charge. I decide what I do. I decide what I want to do. So what do I decide I want to do? What would be the coolest thing for me to publish next, as a word vomit, as a short story, or as dialogue? No, I don’t want to just do a little dialogue. I want to do stories. Well, how am I going to define what a story is? Am I just going to describe a fictional environment? Am I going to describe a single fictional person? Am I going to describe some sort of conflict? I suppose I could run through each of those things. I’m not obliged to write self-contained stories right at the start. I can do snippets, little notes. I can do criticisms and analyses of existing books and of characters. These wouldn’t be pointless, they’ll help me figure out what I want to write later on. As long as I’m doing it for that purpose, and not utterly mindless self-indulgence, that that’s okay. Mindless self indulgence is ALSO okay, but I’d like to do better than that. I don’t want to take random walks in purely random directions when I can take a semi-random walk in a semi-deliberate direction that I know is likely to be better for me.
So… yeah. Maybe I’ll do movie reviews too. I think I’ll do movie / book reviews in the form of conversations between characters that I’ll develop, within some context that I’ll develop. Yes, that sounds like something slightly out of my comfort zone, in the sense that it’s not what I’m already doing, and yet it sounds achievable. It’s a pleasant stretch. That’s what I’m going to do.
It does seem a little crazy ambitious to try to write 500,000 words worth of little stories and such. But really, a million words of anything is pretty crazy. I might as well direct my exploration in some sort of interesting direction. At the end of it all I can pour the molten aluminum (or whatever it is they pour) down this ant hill to see what the network looks like, where it leads, how it’s all interconnected, and what I want to do from there.
Done.