Inspired about inspiration
14 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
in Creative writing, Personal, Thinking aloud Tags: how curious, pseudo-philosophising, writing
I’ve been thinking about writing, recently; more specifically, I’ve been thinking about inspiration.
I’m not sure I’ve advertised this very clearly (because I’m aware that I can be relatively obscure at times; and even if I’m very clear about it, one can very easily get lost in my run-on sentences), so I’ll just put it plainly: I haven’t really written anything creatively for a very, very long while. And with “written anything”, I mean creative pieces of writing that are more than 500 words in length, and that have more of a subject matter than just “she”, which kinda not-very-obscurely most obviously refers to me. *coughcoughgetthereferencecoughcough?*
Anyway. Most of the time, I haven’t written anything because I simply don’t have the time for it, or when I do have the time, I’m too busy staring a wall and drooling because my allocated intelligence for that day (and that week; usually, and rather tragically, happens on a thursday) has been totally used up. Sometimes, however, I’m feeling as awake as anything that feels very awake, as full of energy as anything that feels full of energy (shut up, it’s thursday), and then I sit down and try to write and… nothing comes out.
It’s not that I don’t have ideas, either — I have plenty of ideas. I usually have about 5-10 “what if” scenarios running in my head, alongside a lesser amount of “ooh, that would be SO COOL to write about” sort of ideas. I have characters that I have used for text roleplaying before simply sitting around in the dusty corners of my brain, probably kicking stuff around, bored, that I could use for a variety of stories — and still, when I sit down to write, even with a specific idea in my mind, it just doesn’t come out right. No matter how hard I try, how many times I furiously delete the two or three paragraphs I laboriously type out and re-type them, it just doesn’t seem right. There’s no life into what I write, and sometimes, in some of the cases, it just ends up sounding plain dumb — like something I would’ve written when I was a ten-year-old (though I was a pretty good writer for a ten-year-old).
Most of the time, I’m too busy to really think or worry about it, but when I do have time, and in between study sessions and writing up lab reports in a really scientific style or simply writing a blogpost like this, I kind of wistfully think back to when I was writing my novel or some amazing short story I now read with my eyes wide and go “how the hell did I manage that?”. And then, when I sit down to write and nothing comes out, I wonder — what is it that I’m missing?
Recently, I’ve started to think that it’s inspiration. Writing was never simply a method of telling stories for me — it was a manner of expressing myself, expressing my more violent feelings, the ones that were gnawing my heart and I couldn’t express in other ways, in the fear of scaring other people away. And it wasn’t just that, either — it was my craft, it was my art; because you can’t express feelings adequately if you don’t have the skill for it. I had both the skill, and the drive, and the results, though I say so myself, were pretty spectacular.
I can say for sure that I haven’t lost my craft; I can still write, as is apparent from these blogposts, and the frequent tweeting that I do. Is it, then, that I have lost my drive? I wouldn’t think so, because I still feel as deeply as I ever have, and have as few ways to express it as ever. True, I now have a few more outlets than I have not had before, but I don’t think that that’s such a significant factor in writing. Writing is abstract, writing is personal — when I create, I create things I’m mostly afraid to imagine, myself.
So what is it that I’m missing?
I think what I’m missing is a catalyst. I have all the material — all the experiences, the new information, the feelings that I can turn into a story, but there is no spark. And without a spark, there is no fire. That spark, in creative writing terms, would be inspiration.
I don’t think “inspiration” is equal to simply “having an idea.” Inspiration is when you have an idea, and suddenly it grows in your mind to proportions you can’t really put your finger on — not simply an idea, a starting point, after everything that will happen is blank and left for you to decide, but a cobweb of interconnected, though mostly unvoiced ideas — of possibilities that are endless and can take you anywhere on your journey from your starting point. I have the craft and I have the ideas, but I don’t have the inspiration.
Just as a small side-note — this isn’t particularly problematic to me, at the moment; because being inspired also requires a great amount of capacity for thought and energy, for which I am particularly short at the moment. I hope that the blood pathology I get results for next week will give some insight into why this is, but as of now, I don’t feel particularly worried. I think that when I get my energy back, and I’m more lively again, the flashes of feverish inspiration will return. I can wait. Furthermore, I don’t think this problem would be as… inhibiting as it is currently, if I had kept on writing during the summer, and hadn’t stopped for most of last year. It’s always harder to start than it is to continue, and it requires more energy — which comes back in a circle.
On another, more abstract note — while I was thinking about how I don’t seem to have the inspiration, I started wondering about how other writers do it. Is writers’ block the lack of inspiration? Do other people get inspired out of the blue like I do? What exactly is inspiration?
I don’t have any answers for this yet, but it’d be nice to think on it.
But the most fascinating question is — does anyone have genuine inspiration? Like, sit in a dark room with no stimulus whatsoever, no prior experiences, nothing to colour their perception — are they still inspired? Is it possible to be inspired if there is nothing to “be inspired about” (if you get what I mean; if you don’t then go ahead and ask)?
Love, inspiration and thoughtfulness, lovelies.
p.s. I don’t necessarily agree with how romanticised and “limited” (heh, putting quotation marks around everything solves my problems and makes me seem ambiguous and thoughtful) inspiration is (if you’re confused about what I’m talking about, write “inspiration” into google images. Can I hab wine with mah cheesiness pls?). Anyone can be inspired about absolutely anything, as long as they keep an open mind, I think.
She bought, she read and she fidgeted
13 Jan 2011 1 Comment
in Sort of a review Tags: how curious, human beans, ponderings, pseudo-philosophising, reading
I’ve just finished reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (in two days, no less — I REALLY liked this book), and though I wasn’t originally intending to post about it, nor do I have a clear direction of where my post will go when addressing my reading experience, I decided that I should at least comment upon it — mostly because it’s left me with a feeling of thoughtfulness and a certain uneasiness. For anyone who doesn’t know anything about 1984 (because I’m just too lazy to write it out), or thinks that the author’s name doesn’t ring any bell, you’ll most likely be right with me when I say that this is where the idea of “Big Brother is watching” comes from. Basically, it’s a novel about a society with a government as totalitarian as totalitarian is possible, with a Thought Police shaping and, uh, policing people’s very thoughts. The novel argues very strongly that reality only exists within the mind, and if the Party (the controlling body of the society, obviously) decides that something is real, it will be real — for example that the aeroplane was invented by the Party, never mind it having existed before the concept of the Party was formed. Even the members of the Party can simultaneously be conscious of their own lies and yet believe in them unconditionally.
There are a few very obvious reasons for my unease. The main ones of these are, of course, the Party’s methods of totalitarian control — the oppression of thought and happiness and sexual pleasure and the way in which it keeps its citizens in poverty. It’s simply horrifying to think of a life with the happiness of living taken away from it. This, however, is actually a concept too great and maybe painful for me to understand fully, loving life as much as I do, so for me, the most concerning bit was the way in which this method of control very much makes sense. It brings back the garbled jargon that the Architect in the Matrix films asserts that human beings aren’t content with happiness, that they constantly seek conflict and unhappiness. I can’t remember the specifics of what the Architect said (it’s been a while; should probably rewatch the movies soon), but that’s the general idea that stuck with me. Then you look at the media, and see the overwhelming negativeness of news items every day. You don’t get stories about the moderately successful and blissfully married couple, you get the stories about the abusive husbands and the alcoholic mothers who neglect and/or kill their children… What for? Why doesn’t good news sell?
Then there’s the quote from O’Brien (not going to spoil it for anyone who would like to read the book at some point, so I won’t explain this character at all; only that he isn’t THE main character) toward the end: “Men are infinitely malleable.” I’ve recently become increasingly frustrated at people who very clearly (especially recently with a certain human bean who had the habit of quoting my opinions from 5 minutes ago directly back at me; annoying and hilarious at the same time) blindly follow the opinions and arguments of those they deem more “intellectual” than themselves, without bothering to address the problem from a more personal perspective. This happens, for example, with the knee-jerk reaction connected to my generation and religion, in my case, against Christianity. You tell someone that you’re Christian, or that you believe in a God, or you begin talking about a subject somewhat related to spirituality or something, and you’ll have a few types of people loudly proclaiming about how stupid the Bible and creationism are and how no-one in their right mind could possibly belong to a religion like Christianity in a modern age such as this. They don’t consider the fact that religion is experienced very personally, and that simply belonging to a religion doesn’t mean that you follow or even accept each and every one of their teaching as right — I don’t think some of them even understand the intricacy that comes to the teachings of Christianity, or that one of the main teachings (at least to me) seems to be love. … But this wasn’t supposed to be my rant about people’s attitudes toward my religion, and I apologise for my personal, ironically acquired knee-jerk reaction when it comes to thoughts like this.
Regardless, the principle is there: men are infinitely malleable. We pick up values and opinions and points of view without having a conscious knowledge of having done so. If confronted with a skillful speaker or writer who can present their views and persuade audiences with great skill, it doesn’t even matter whether or not the things they say are true — we will still believe them. We will believe them, because it’s so very easy, and analysing and researching a given piece of information isn’t. The whole point is that a human mind is most definitely subjective, and since it’s so subjective, and since a lot of our thought processes are complex and oftentimes subconscious and automatic, it’s easy to deceive. And that’s what scares me about 1984 — how accurately it portrays the difficulty of determining the truth (be it any truth about any subject) and a reality. Even science is subjective — as long as science requires human operation, it will continue to be incomplete. People are very good at seeing what they want to see.
Those are a few of the most apparent and obvious things that 1984 will make you think about. I don’t claim to be any intellectual when it comes to taking ideas out of a novel like that, so you’ll just have to read it yourself to see for yourself. However, what really caused the most uneasy feeling in me wasn’t my intellectual response to what I was reading, but the emotional response to — I think there will be a few spoilers now, be ready — the revelation that through his inner rebellion, Winston had been monitored constantly. It was only the fact that Winston continued to hope and dream and feel human that the description of the conditions of that state were bearable; the revelation that none of it was… true, I suppose, that the reader had been fooled to hope with Winston that he might be able to rebel against the state and survive left me with a chill. Because of the way Winston’s inner life is portrayed in the novel, the reader lives with him very closely; feeling his aches and his pains and his thoughts vividly. I, at least, thought him clever — more clever than some of the characters he deemed intelligent in the novel. It’s hard to explain what I mean, but the fact that Winston was cheated means that I, as a reader, since I was rooting for Winston’s freedom of thought, was cheated as well. In a way, my rebellion was crushed against the Party, as well — though the Party is fictional.
I suppose that this is the thing that really stuck with me from 1984. The power of the Party reached out of the novel, and it reached for me.
Peace and slight paranoia and thoughts of conspiracy theories and uneasiness to everyone~
Another Incident that just went off
01 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Uncategorized Tags: how curious, human beans, ponderings, pseudo-philosophising
Quick note: I updated the previous post to contain the picture that I promised. Go check it out. :3 It’s also got a short description written beneath it.
Another quick note: the title of this post is from the lyrics of The Ultimate Fling by Poets of the Fall — which, I suppose, is a good soundtrack for this post and a really great song, so I’ll just post it down here, so you might listen to it while reading:
Third quick note: happy September ;3 We’re this much closer to summer! <———> (not to scale)
Human beans are curious beings (c wat I did thar? Not only did I make a funny [debatable], but I also managed to keep the sentence fresh and interesting and oh God I’ve done entirely too much language analysis). Or, well, at least teenagers are, because they’re really the single group of people I spend enough time around to evaluate common behaviour. And that sounds like I’m some sort of a creepy stalker who just sits in the corner with a twisted smile on her face and WATCHES, unseen by everyone else — which is kind of funny, because that’s the person I sometimes am. Except for the twisted smile; people tend to notice twisted smiles. All I’m saying is that in Australia, you really have to work to be noticed (something I’m getting better at), and I, as a more-or-less subtle Finn, can pretty much vanish from sight if I really want to.
Or could, before people started knowing who I am.
But that’s kind of going off on a tangent about what I wanted to talk about. In my awesome English class — actually, I should probably give you a bit of background on this one, first. My English class is one of the smaller ones in the year level — I think there are only around fifteen students there. Also, it seems almost like some sort of a conspiracy, because there’s a LOT of good English students in that class; and with a lot, I mean that when we had the task to give a persuasive oral speech to the class (and anyone whose English/[insert language here] class has ever had to do anything of the like are cringing now, knowing how bad and downright BORING those things can get), every single one in the class was actually worth listening to. This was a phenomenomnomnom that baffled me for ages, and still continues to. The only answer to the brilliancy (according to my spellcheck, that’s actually a word. Go figure) of this class would be to call it a conspiracy, so I narrow my eyes and do exactly so.
But, as most of you probably would know, when you put a roomful of competent people together, you very quickly realise that that roomful of competent people also happens to be a roomful of strongly opinionated people — and most of the time, those competent people will have very different points of view on each subject and they will be very vocal about their disagreement. Or that’s the situation in my class, at least. I know that I’m somewhat guilty of this crime, because I’m rather enamored with telling people what I think — but like I’ve probably said before, I think that I usually try to be courteous toward other people and understand that different people have different points of view, and there’s nothing too weird about that. But for me, that realisation (or, well, the full implications and practice of it) has come only recently (I’m somewhat ashamed to admit — I’ve always KNOWN it, but when you have passion, you know, you sometimes — most of the time — become blind to all reason), and to most of the people in my class, it still hasn’t.
This equals to a lot of loud discussion, flaring tempers and people speaking all over each other — much like I described in the context essay thing (the one about writing, where I mentioned the Great Debate) that I posted a week or so ago. Even though I’m aware that I’m doing it myself on some minor degree (or at least suspecting that I do it — it’s really difficult to view your behaviour objectively), it’s always seemed bizarre to me how people can’t fathom the fact that there might be some sort of a reason for the other person to think or feel as they do about the subject, and it’s not always even POSSIBLE for everyone to agree with you. I do understand the sting of trying to explain something that is really close to you and someone just looking at you blankly, or insulting you mildly by not even trying to understand. However, I think that this is just an adaptation of the same thing — if you want everyone to agree with you, unconditionally, you won’t really try to understand someone else, will you? I can understand if someone doesn’t understand, truly, but all I’d want is an “I’m sorry, but I really cannot understand that point of view because I’ve always thought/I was taught that/I’ve come to think that…” and an exploration of one’s own point of view, or something along the lines of that. Just because you don’t understand doesn’t mean that the point of view isn’t valid, and that’s something an alarming number of people fail to grasp.
I’m talking about this right now, because there was another Incident in my English class today. There is this girl in my class, known for her adamant views and her devil-cares attitude when it comes to everyone else’s opinion, making me, at least, who is sensitive to what people want of me, tread around her on my toes, nodding and smiling and very careful not to give her any of my opinions (or if I do, I try not to leave her with any fodder to begin arguing) so as to not have to fight it out with her. She is also known for giving her opinion even when she isn’t asked for one. Who doesn’t know one of those people? Another aspect of her points of view, as usually with strong-headed people like that, is that she is very unwilling to compromise, and hence her opinions are rather narrow-minded, which can be forgiven, as she wouldn’t have had too much experience with having to compromise. Anyway, today, she began giving her point of view on a certain key scene in The Streetcar Named Desire, and on what it meant for the characters and the themes of the play. Simply put, her views were contested and she stormed out of the room.
On hindsight, it was fair enough — a few people (including myself, though I mainly participated in making doubtful noises and raising my eyebrow) ganged up on her, and she might have felt herself isolated and frustrated as she could not make us understand that point of view. This argument was about raping (as there’s a rape scene in the play; I’m sorry if I spoiled it for someone), and how she believed that a man must hate a woman — or something about a woman — in order to be able to do such a thing to her. I can see that she, as a feminist, would’ve felt strongly about that sort of a thing — I know the feeling; and with me, it’s usually about religion and that bloody knee-jerk reaction people get when you mention Christianity, which has made me rather unwilling to talk about my religion, sadly, in the fear of getting hurt.
Anyway, this reaction was understandable from all different points of view — though I mostly stand by our right to disagree without her having to give up on the argument and storm out of the room. We could have been more diplomatic with her, yes, but she could have asked us to be slightly more diplomatic with her, of course. What I don’t accept nor understand is the aftermath of that storming out — there were a few chuckles, and for the remainder of the class, the rest of my class yet continued to disprove and ridicule this girl’s argument behind her back. It seemed to me as if it was some sort of a creation of group spirit, or something, in singling out an opinion and then repeating its invalidity over and over and over. It’s hardly fair to continue to argue, or to poke fun at someone when they aren’t there to explain and defend their point of view — it’s another one of those narrow-minded things that people seem to do instinctively. I can’t say that I approve.
And here, I conclude my overly long explanation of what I feel about arguments without a real contention of valid conclusion. Or, well, I suppose I could conclude like I conclude most of my discussion on the context “whose reality” (which relates directly to one’s points of view, if you think about it, because the perception of reality is based on one’s self, and since we’re all different, we’ve all got our different realities): people should try to remember that as much as they believe they are right, 100%, they should try to remember that the person they are arguing against will also think that they are right and you are wrong. I’m not saying that you should somehow always agree with people to make them happy — I don’t exactly endorse dishonesty. Disagree all you want, but do so politely, and if possible, explain why you think so and express that you are happy to accept the disagreement as it is, because you understand that this person has their point of view, and you respect that.
I bet that’ll make a lot of people happy around you.
I’ll just catch up with the prompts tomorrow, because today I’ve already written a post longer than most people are willing to read, I suppose.
Peace and respect and acceptance to everyone, : )
