For my first blog, I'm just gonna start with something I've been meaning to discuss on for ages. Well, perhaps less discuss and more rant: writing. Creative writing, for lack of a better term.
I'm pretty sure I'm a shit writer, in some aspects. Certainly, when it comes to getting natural sounding dialogue and characters, so far I think I pretty much suck. But for some reason, there's been an idea stuck in my head. Knawing at me, begging for me to get off my lazy arse and just get on with writing it. After all, will anyone else do it? Will anyone else try to write such a ridiculous story?
It started off with trying to think of a really cool story that I want to read. That's it. That's how selfish my motivation is. A really cool scifi story, but really different, too. It really kick started off with two things: first, Stephen King's epic Dark Tower series. Never before had I read a series that encompassed so many genres and dealt with so much epic storytelling: love, friendship, good vs evil, none exactly original, but all mostly done right. Some parts of the story, I had problems with, but I still loved the overall story like no other.
Then another story came along, although I think it was a long time before I began to realise how much of an impact it had on me: British tv series Life on Mars, the story of a modern day cop hit by a car and sent travelling back in time to 1973. Now although I loved it from the first ep, initially it was just for the car chases, the humour, the characters, and the brand new take on time travel. But as time has gone on, it went from being a show I greatly enjoyed to being an important show, one I would watch at least once a year. This is something I don't do with a lot of my favourite films, let alone favourite tv series, but Life on Mars was different. Because buried underneath it all, there was a deep psychological and philosophical story going on, too, a story that examined the importance of reality, of the difference between what we think we hate or love and what we actually hate or love. Of being lost in a strange land and being unsure of who you even are.
These are things I began to realise as important when long term unemployment settled in.
Now I'm glad that period in my life is behind me (for now, although it has to be said that it could rear it's ugly head one day again, but not anytime soon, I don't think), but that time of my life was by far the least happiest. In that situation, it was so easy to feel isolated, directionless in the worst possible sense. I'm sure a hell of a lot of us have been there, so I won't pretend that this was unique to me, or that it's the most horrible story you'll ever here in life. But that's when the novel went from being something to occasionally think about to becoming a need, something on printed paper that had to be done. Over 4 years later, I'll be honest, it's nowhere near done. Because when I do try and write it, I get so easily distracted, sometimes by tv, sometimes by books, but most of the time by over thinking the story itself, of thinking some grand mythology or arc to add to the whole thing.
Then I began to realise that that's all bullshit.
The reason I'm writing this blog is just to get out some of my frustrations, partly, but also as a reminder of why I'm writing this bastard in the first place: to exorcise all those frustrations a man can feel in life - of being secondary at best, and a nobody at worst; of being completely unable of knowing what the fuck you're gonna do with your life, and what's gonna happen next. Thankfully, I don't have to deal with these problems now, but these were problems I had a few years ago, and I sure as hell know there's plenty of people out there now who are having those exact same problems. Working out the plot structure, of epic battles and trying to squeeze in genres, they should all be secondary at best to making your reader feel, and I mean really feel, feel happy, feel sad, feel like they're gonna die because they're laughing so much, it doesn't matter, but at the end of the day, my priority at least is to use the story to make the reader feel something and connect directly to them.
Do I think I'm actually good enough to do that? No.
But it can't hurt to try now, can it?
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