Bonjour La Solidarité

Just a few thoughts on my recent writer's block and writing process.

Not even a moment of unsanctified respite tonight. The rustling shakes up my snoozing consciousness. The cat must be trapped on the balcony again. The rage about finding it licking my freshly-made dinner justifies my inhumane lack of sympathy, I think.

I had taken refuge in my room after listening to a jumble of muffled music, from both outside and inside of my head, for much longer than necessary.

What else is new?

I am still thinking about the young shaven-headed screenwriter, born somewhere in the midst of Conservative Party discussions and quick oversalted dinners in an unspecified English town whose name I don't recognize nor remember. His comments ring a bell. The swapping of steps in the story-making process won my attention, really. That is: I say, therefore I do. I heard common mortals do things the other way around. Action prompts dialogue, in any decent civil society anyway. ("I am neither decent nor civil," my fingers want to write. Should I submit to the curious intrusive twitching, everything about my person would be given away in a single post.)

Anyway, he reminds me of someone I know from before, and that someone is an unspecified genie, whom I do not know from before.

Nonetheless, another unspecified genie appears in the second part of my new series, The Plebs of a Sentient Code, my proudest creation so far whose progress was halted by a rather obtrusive block tonight. To explain the reason behind the unduly self-imposed pressure: as a matter of fact, I finished the third part a few days ago. That's right: the third part was born before its numerical predecessor. (Some of you may recall the theory of serial numbers in the first part PoSC: twenty-seven specimens, equal in making and quality, none of them a nano-second older than the other.)

Yet sadly, I can't publish the third part without finishing the second one first.

Whining about my writer's block today sparked a series of reflections on my writing. Don't get me wrong: this is not the type of activity that I engage in often, let alone voluntarily. But digging through the dunes and sediments in my brain to get to the bottom of the question of why I refuse to join the writers' community seemed timely and appropriate.

A nice, hot, mid-July moment of frankness.

Studying writing has always seemed rather superfluous to me. Let me illustrate my point with an example. Imagine a scene in which person A is trying to convince person B that trusting the alleged fortune-teller is a hazardous decision. I can a) scrutinize how someone else has written about and described the scene, or b) use a different medium (a film scene, a picture, a quote, an anecdote I heard, a sound, a piece of furniture, an instrument, a song, a medical definition.. you name it) to investigate the meaning of the scene and the impact it has on me to be able to write about it.

In other words, the era of learning to write by reading has long been overdue for me.

I take much more inspiration from engaging with the world happening around me. It is almost ridiculous how long I take to answer the simple question, "Can you recommend a good book to me?" Archives of words simply escape my memory.

I suspect learning to write by scrutinizing writers, even past the "imitation" stage (we've all gone through the stage of impersonating famous writers to give our writing that air of importance and professionalism), contributes to making your writing more generic. You may as well be the sum of the authors you've read. I know I would. Unconsciously and involuntarily, but there's not denying it.

But the little wonders of life--the way someone utters a word or the look they cast in your direction when you're riding on the subway. That's the actual reason I want to write.

So forgive me for this boring treatise, but I found that to be quite pertinent information. Stop requesting that I join "the others like you." Excuse me for requesting that you don't read my texts as if you were reading a novel on the beach to kill time while tanning. Consider them as coming from the outside world and living their own life beyond the scope of a dumb piece of paper (/screen.)

Or, as I would say in a parallel universe (i.e. if my geographic background allowed me to, i.e. 2: echoing the claim of someone whose existence I deeply respect and secretly envy all living and deceased beings who have come in physical contact with them, and even those who are yet to be born and be more lucky than myself)----bonjour la solidarité. With all of our non-standard, arbitrary emotional and creative needs.

 

P.S.: I realize that this post contains claims that many may not agree with. And it doesn't bother me. Feel free to reach out.