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.

white fear

The emptiness of the blank page scares me. But not as much as the fear of what I might put on it, what messy and awkward prose might stain its pristine whiteness if I write. I both love and fear writing. My fears are the same, probably, as any other writer. I fear my own clumsy wording and awkward sentence structure. I fear that I am utterly deluded in my aspirations to be a writer. I fear that the words may stare back at me, accusitory, forcing me to face the pretentiousness of my own writing. But what I fear most is my inability to adequately express my interior thoughts. For days, weeks, months, something will be burning up my insides, screaming at me to be written, but I will hedge. I do not believe that my random whims are worthy of being set out on paper, but more than that, I fear that there is something in me that I long to tell the world, but that I will not be able to do it justice.

I have spent the past two years writing on the same topic. I cannot name, identify or summarise what exactly it has been. But in my fiction and non-fiction, the same sentiments seem to be coming through. Even through the journeys and thoughts of other characters, these are explicitly personal to me. I am seeking to discover meaning, like we all are. But I seem to be going about it in a strange way, by constantly searching for an imperfect role model. For some reason I feel this will help me come to terms with my life regardless of where it leads. I have written about the adolescent and adult journeys of women who have lived a life outside of the mould I have been brought up in. I have been fascinated with the events of the past and the way in which they affect the present. I find something both poetic and real about the idea of the butterfly effect. I spend hours discussing it with my friends, my family, tracing the events that have led to me being the person I am today. What small event changed the course of your life without you realising it? I wonder constantly about this. A person you met, a meeting you turned up to, a night you decided to stay in or go out. The possibilities are endless and to a large extent this is a pointless exercise. Whether you believe in predeterminism or think that everything is random, you could go on forver analysing. Or at least I could. But I haven’t lived very long. I don’t have enough life to examine and I find myself fascinated instead with the lives of others. So far these have been lives that are ordinary and yet I have found something gripping in them. I wonder if this is the process of discovering the history of people you knew before, and finding them changed in your eyes because of it. I wonder if it is only interesting to me and if to everyone else these concepts are basic and not worthy of thought or analysis.

In a week’s time I have to workshop something for my creative writing class and already the clamp of stress is starting to squeeze me. I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said, so why bother? I do not have the ability of some of my classmates, who can make the simplest, tiniest thing in life become tangibly and amazingly alive through the medium of language. I have nothing to offer, and I feel overwhelmed. Maybe I should open a cupcake shop…

A random image for your enjoyment….