Shut Up And Listen 226

Writing

I love writing. I probably love writing more than anything in the world. Everything I do seems to relate back to writing somehow. That new movie I saw? Interesting idea, but the execution was shit, I can do it better. A night out with some friends? Change this, this, and that, and you've got a solid story. A ride on the bus to work? Excellent time to plot something. Everything connects to writing with me. I can't imagine life without being able to write. That said, I fucking hate writing with a passion and wish I'd never begun because now it tortures me day and night, the fucking thing.

I've written a few columns on writing before, almost all of them relating to writing this column when I didn't have any ideas. As annoying as that is, it's nowhere near as frustrating when I'm working on something else that just isn't coming. With this column, there's always next week. I always have another chance to redeem myself. With other stuff, though, there isn't that luxury. I'm beginning to enter a phase where I'm tired of just writing for myself and am looking to the future. I mean, I'm entering my last year of university, so maybe it's time I begin trying seriously at making a go of it, you know?

The problem is strange. When I'm on, I'm on. I write semi-good stuff at a quick pace. Usually, I can do a thousand words in half an hour if I'm really going. I think I learned to write quickly because I tend to lose my interest in stuff soon after thinking it up. If I leave it too long, suddenly it becomes old and uninteresting. I always want to push forward and do new things. So, I can write quite fast. But, I also seem to only be able to write for a solid couple of hours a day if I'm on. When I'm on, I usually average around fifteen hundred to two thousand words a day. That first half hour usually makes up half of my production.

Last week, I was on. Over the five weekdays, I wrote a seven thousand, five hundred word story and then on the weekend, another story that was only thirty-five hundred words. I was rather pleased with myself. That's a solid performance. Eleven thousand words in seven days is a decent output. And then this past week, I've produced, oh, maybe six hundred words of a new story. Actually, no, that's a lie, I've produced probably two thousand words of a new story, but only have six hundred words currently because of false starts and rewriting. I don't even know if I'll finish it.

The strange thing is, I don't even know if the two stories I did write are any good, or if the stuff I deleted while working on the unfinished one was bad. I have no perspective on what I write. I tend to just go by a feeling as to whether it's bad or not. Even if I look it over later, I can't tell. Nine times out of ten, I hate what I've written. I can't stand it. All I see are the mistakes and the differences between what's on the page and what was in my head. Because it's always so perfect in my head. Writing, to me, is the exercise of trying to get what's in my head down on paper as closely as possible. I've yet to come even close with regards to actual writing. Sometimes, that's a good thing as I surprise myself with something that's even better, but most of the time, it's just so much worse.

Gotta keep up the effort, though. I've gotta push through and keep working at it. I've gotta go from telling people that I want to be a writer to telling people that I am a writer. My goal is to be there, in some capacity, a year from now. I know, technically, I am one because I've written a lot of stuff for my uni's paper and am now an editor there, but I mean in a larger sense. Like getting some stuff published in a magazine or something. So, that's where I'm going.