Photoshop and fun

Ava Gardner collage I had some fun making for Bron’s 17th Birthday. Bless photoshop.

So. Here’s an excerpt from a blog I wrote a month ago but decided not to post:

“Only two more semester now. Approximately 30 more hours of sitting, self-loathing, in tute’s full of wankers telling me exactly how not to write like a cliche, until everyone is writing in the same unique way.

When will the end come? Months of finding myself in Readings or Borders, compelled every time to march straight to the new journals and anthologies, opening them to the contents page in order to scan it for names that I recognise. Yes, I know that name. Had a tute with him last semester. She was at that seminar last month. That guy won that competition recently.

Then it’s  over to the classics stand, eyes scrutinizing the spines with their famous names. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Forster. Time to inject myself with some more 20^th century fiction. Stuff myself with it till I’m suffocating with words, sentences, clauses, possessive nouns, cliches and idioms.

I write less and less. I sit down once a week at the most, with laptop or pen and paper. It makes no difference; the weight of the entire literary world bears down on my shoulders, heavier and heavier each time. Instinctively, the pen freezes. The words are wrong. They are all wrong. I haven’t used enough of the five senses. My adjectives are overdone, the sentiments that should be there haven’t come out right. I am not clear, not precise. I didn’t put the reader there. They were not with me. They were not there. That metaphor was over used, that entire sentence over worked. Fuck. I say it silently under my breath several times. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

So. Self-indulgent, yes. But my little *creative writing crisis* reached it’s frenzied  summit about a month ago, when I realised that I had actually started to hate the one thing that I’ve always loved.  Nothing about it was fun anymore. It was all academic. All about failure, criticism, insecurity, bogus academia, prestige (or lack of it), some ridiculous idea of what it means to be “a writer”.

Worst of all I couldn’t tell whether it was outside forces (Melbourne Uni, Creative Writing tutorials etc) that were doing this to me, or whether in fact I was doing it to myself. Putting myself in this world, this literary, academic world has truly taken all the joy out of writing for me.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Melbourne Uni. Subjects like Sex and Gender have fundamentally changed the way I see the world. Today I walked home contemplating the ideas that I had this time four or five years ago, thinking about the person I was then, and I found that I couldn’t recognize myself. I pitied that person, that person trapped in a confining belief system that was destroying them. By some kind of grace I’ve been allowed to go to Uni and do a degree that has literally opened me up from the inside out.  Why let anything destroy that?

I know that I can write. I can write fiction when I want to, but I can also write damn good essays. I can think critically and put those thoughts down on paper with clarity. Feeling unworthy because I throw a few too many adjectives in now and then is ludicrous.

When I was fourteen or fifteen my brother and I spent our school holidays making up stories together. One he started he called the “Island Series” was about a community of families that lived on this little imaginary farming island. We drew maps and pictures of all the characters and the way that they all related to each-other (cousins, best friends, lovers, etc). Then we’d each pick a character and start writing from their perspective. We’d make up plots and each take on the parts of different characters. We planned for these things to be novels, and I think they often got to about ten or fifteen thousand words or so before we got tired of them and started something else.

Writing those stories was one of my absolute favorite things to do on winter school holidays. Getting lost in an imaginary world which I could create and explore through writing had to be about the greatest way I could think to spend my time. From primary school til late high school writing these long, novel-esque narratives about familys and relationships and adventures was all I did.

At uni that all went away. Instead of writing more, I wrote less. Each semester I’ve painstakingly churned out 3,000 words for assessment, something I wouldn’t have thought twice about as a kid. Sure, perhaps the quality was considerably better. After all,  I had to think about language and sentence structure and originality in a way I never had before. At first, although it was hugely challenging, it was invigorating. I learned about different styles of writing, different avenues I could take. But somewhere in the last three years the love of creating things with language fell by the wayside, got lost in the angst of making sure I was writing the “right” way.

One of my saviors in the last few weeks was reading Mr Paul’s self-published book “Trippa”. Sure, it wasn’t perfect. It didn’t always get the grammar right. But it was fun. Clever, honest, page-turning. It reminded me of how much fun writing is. It was enough to make me realise that there’s a fundamental joy in writing that I want back.  Like, if I could somehow shed this infected skin of academia and all the insecurities that have slowly grown all over it,  if I could get back to that pure, raw excitement and love of writing I had when Chris and I wrote the Island stories, then something great could happen. I could do this, for real. Take the stuff I’ve learned and mix it in with the fun. Leave all the other stuff behind.

I’ve decided that I won’t be doing honours next year. And in all likelihood it won’t be in creative writing if I ever do. For now, all that pressure has to go. I’m not going to worry about publishing, about any of that shit. But over the semester break I’m going to spend some rainy days drawing up character profiles and dreaming up fantastical plots. And maybe then the words will start coming back.

outside, something was happening to her tricycle!

Well, I’ve passed nearly seven weeks weeks of study-less winter, with a meagre income and sporadic employment. I have to say, it’s been an interesting time of self-reflection. I found that if I have a competent ability to commit to a task and complete it, and that I can go crazy within 48 hours of being house-bound.

I’m going to take a moment to revel in my “J-ness”, and since I set out a list of things I planned to accomplish at the beginning of my break, I’ll now share with the internet world the fruits of my labour.

The first two weeks of break were spent with early grey tea, a blanket and a weekly cheap-tuesday trip to Video Ezy. Some of the films that I ticked off my list included (in alphabetical order and with my out of five star rating)

American Beauty * * *

All about Eve * * *

Being John Malcovitch * *

The Breakfast Club * * * *

The Birds * * * * *

Children of men * * *

Crash * * *

Edward Scissorhands * * *

Fight Club * * * * *

Lost in Translation * * *

Notes on a scandal * * * *

Terminator * * *

Terminator II * * * *

After reaching saturation point, I turned to books as my source of entertainment, and completed:

A Passage To India by E.M Forster, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, On Beauty by Zadie Smith, and am currently halfway through Monkey Grip by Helen Garner. I’ve also invested in Goodreads, which I highly recommend since it gave me hours of boredom-free pleasure: adding books, writing reviews and perusing other people’s bookshelves.

As for writing, I feel happy with the fact that I spent several days writing without being under duress. I also sent a couple of things to competitions and publishers which was a big psychological leap.

But it was other creative endeavours that turned out to be my saviour from insanity. Jumping up in the deacoupaging league, I collaged a coffee table!

I also got even more crafty with Orsh and on an unexpected spotlight trip bought the materials to make this little baby!

As promised, gardening, sewing and cooking were also undertaken. I took up two hems, cleared our courtyard (two days of raking) and Stu planted some corriander in pots, which will hopefully be the beginning of a flourishing herb garden (or at least… a semi-productive herb garden).

During the much awaited Sibling holiday, which was every bit as fun as anticipated, I also had some amazing op-shop buys which I have to share! I believe this notched up my vintageness by about 25 percent. Even better, it’s given me an idea on an article I plan to write about Vintage fashion, Nostalgia in Postmodern theory (yes, it sounds uber-wanky, but I figure at the very least my obsession with the retro must have some explanation waiting to be uncovered).

Tomorrow I leave for four days to the nation’s capital, where I’ll be attending a Deep Sea themed party (costume yet to be configured) and going skiing at Threadbo, my first ever trip to the slopes. Following that, Uni commences bright and early 1pm Monday afternoon, with a Film Noir introductory lecture. Joy!

wonderful month ahead

  Ah, holidays!

Now that assessment is over and I can breathe again, I plan to get a bit better at blogging regularly (or for the next six weeks, at least)….

To start off, these are some collages I made out of the 1950s film star albums I got ages ago. This one didn’t work because of the wrong type of glue which made the paper bubble (boo) but with a bit of photoshopping, I thought it was worth posting anyway. 

The next one isn’t quite as pretty (perhaps it is the absence of Grace Kelly?) but so far I haven’t destroyed it with poor lacquering attempts.

My glorious holiday plans   include:

* Making more collages

* Attempting to alter numerous market/op-shop items on the sewing machine (hems, darts, pleats… I can totally do it!) 

 * Learning how to operate my lovely new Nikon SLR Camera (ditto)

* Getting a significant way through the epic movie list I have compiled with the help of Stuart, Jonathan, IMDB and various other recommendations. The list includes all of the films of Alfred Hitchcock and most of the films of David Lynch, plus a significant contribution from the action genre which I seem to have missed out on… much fun to be had! 

* Reading Lolita and The Sound and the Fury (I just finished A passage to India today, which I won’t comment on now because it deserves a whole post to itself…)

* The upcoming sibling holiday, which will include numerous games of Balderdash and probably much reminiscing, plus a trip to Canberra to see boyfriends friends (maybe my friends? hopefully). 

* A whole new level of domestic enquiry…  (just wait and see!)