Friday, April 28, 2017

Blow It Away and Wish for More

I’ve gone through a pretty big period of writer’s block recently and haven’t been particularly inspired to write lately, so you’ll have to forgive me if the rust on my writing is especially evident right now.

My daily responsibilities, things like making dinner, walking the dog, doing laundry, etc., have started to take over my free time and I find it hard to make time for writing a blog or work on short stories and songs. All of those have to be done and when you combine the time and effort that they take up, in addition to the 9ish hours I spend on the way to, at, and coming home from work, I find that I’m just too tired to even put five words beside each other. This makes for a silly ultimatum though: Either quit my job and write full-time, pass off all household responsibilities to Becks and spend all my free time writing, or just do it all and be tired.

I hope that you can tell I’m just being silly and that I’m going to try to commit to the last one.

I find it troubling that I haven’t been motivated to write lately and have gotten much stuff up here or into the “Short Stories” folder on my computer. Work has been relatively tame lately and hasn’t been driving me crazy the way that it sometimes does, so should I not be directing this energy towards writing? I know that there are some busy weeks on the horizon that will no doubt suck up almost all of my energy, so I’m worried that the last two months will turn into a batch of wasted time and a big missed opportunity.

I think that something else that has contributed to me letting my motivation slip away has been the upcoming trip to Europe that I’m taking with Becks. I think that I subconsciously put things off because I plan to write like a fiend while I’m there. This is not a healthy way to approach a large project. While I do plan to write as much as I can while we travel through Paris, Italy, and Germany (this no doubt a result of my infatuation with the Lost Generation), I think that the trip has developed into something unrealistic in my mind. I’ll try to write as much as I can, but I will not have endless free time to develop my creative pursuits. I can’t allow my whole writing project to hinge on a two-week trip.

God, I hate the way this text looks. It feels like recalling the way I write casually and the words I like to use is the hardest thing in the world. I don’t want all of this to sound like a professional email I’m sending to someone I don’t know.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Ass. There we go.

I have an especially hard time writing lyrics, which is not a new development. I used to use writing songs as a primary outlet for my feelings, but that has really waned wince I joined Beat Noir. I think a big part of it was that I knew that any lyrics I wrote would not be as good as Duff’s, so I gradually stopped bothering, though by no conscious effort of my own. It weirdly started to feel like I didn’t have things to write songs about and no proper way to say them. Then I had things to write about, but found I couldn’t force a word out of my head. Song-wise I’ve got at least a sketch of everything on guitar (which is actually good!), but everything else is nowhere close. I try to write about work and politics, but find it just comes out as hackneyed and juvenile. Things make a lot of sense in my mind, but for some reason any genuine thoughts and emotion don’t translate when I try to write them in a notebook. It’s frustrating.

For now, this is my plan:

Take a deep breath and think about the plan for the year. It’s perfectly reasonable and attainable. Don’t forget that you’re talented and smart enough to do this. Have confidence in what you’re doing and don’t stop working on stories on songs, no matter how trivial aspects of it may seem.

And please, ask me how this is all going when I see you, because that will surely motivate me to do more.