to write or not to write
10.20.03 @ 10:09 a.m.
Leah just wrote completely what I feel about inspiration lately. There's nothing there. Is it worth it, trading in a satisfactory, pleasant life for boundless creativity?
Tying it in to my own obsessions (and I'm in the computer lab having to slam into these keys because they're sticking, so bear with me), Townshend and Moon were extremely insecure. Townshend was abused as a small child. His parents would go off and leave him with his grandmother. No wonder he sought the attention of the crowd. Ray High [protagonist of Psychoderelict] says he always had the need to make people look away from the beautiful and toward him.
I don't have that. My dad said yesterday afternoon that 'everyone wants an audience' but I don't think that's true. I don't let people read what I write (with fiction, anyway) and I don't force my friends to listen to me play guitar. Or my family. Or anyone. I don't think I'm that good, which my dad keeps telling me isn't true, that I am quite good. Bull. He also thinks I should be playing guitar for my friends. I don't think they care, really. I mean, they do in a 'good for you, good that you have a hobby' way, but they're not exactly falling to their knees and begging me to just play my clumsy renditioin of "Pinball Wizard" for them.
[Also, I am aware that by writing here I am soliciting an audience that I quite like. But somehow that feels different.]
This was not my purpose in writing. I always get away from what I meant to do. This is my angst of the day: I don't really want to write another Regency, though I know that I can. I soak it up like a sponge. I'm not even sure that I want to do National Novel Writing Month again this year, though I think I could pull it off, especially if I started hauling the laptop to class and working in my class breaks. I wasn't going to try this year. And then goddamn inspiration struck.
For quite some time now I've had a half-assed science/speculative fiction idea that I wanted to force myself to work on to get out of the romance writing rut. (This includes fanfiction, which is by it's nature romantic or sexual.) (Mine is usually high angst due to separation. My one Who fic, "I Can't Reach You", has gone through several variations on that theme in it's many rewrites.) So I had this post-apocalypse idea inspired by some guy on NPR making a crack about the Who's "Rael" being about the Rael cult. Then I started thinking about a cult formed in the wake of an apocalypse that bases it's entire philosophy on a pop song. No, that's not right. They formed a long time ago and shut themselves off from the world, and that's how they SURVIVED the apocalypse. But in between their seclusion and the decimation of the world's population, lost work by that songwriter was discovered, including a coda to the song the cult clings to. That coda would turn their world absolutey upside down. This could just be a chapter in the life of the main character, Traveler, who is searching the country to gather up the remains of the lost culture. Books, music, what have you. And it lacked romance! Hurrah for me! I've written three or four variations on the beginning, even. So that was my plan for NaNoWriMo, though I think I'd get blocked up on it easily. All else fails, I could play fast and loose with it and just get silly whenever I feel stopped up.
Then on Saturday I lingered at the top of the stairs where my mom had just installed two bookcases. One of them had a book called Odd Girl Out, which is about 'the hidden culture of agression in girls'. The bits I flipped through mostly delt with the vicious ostracism that teenage girls are capable of. So now I'm in a litte bit of a muddle because I could so, so easily write a Regency on those ideas, girls getting 'cut' and ignored and suffering through their time in London. But I feel... vapid and shallow when I write Regency. I feel like I should be doing something more. And that Regency was all I thought I could really write.
Now, of course, I've synopsized "Rael" for the fifty thousandth time and I think I could work on it again. Damn it! I don't know what to do. Should I not even try? It's not that I don't have the time. I waste time like nobody's business. But can I do this and do my schoolwork and not go into a nervous collapse? God help us all if I start to go Mrs. Bennet on people. I suppose I can try and there's always room to give up if I can't hack it this year. But somehow I think I'd rather not try than try and fail. What a horrible way to go about things. What I think I should do is go for it with "Rael." I just don't know if I can. (Also: I've read The Stand. How can I write this now without COMPLETELY ripping of S. King?)
Previously
fuck it @ 08.01.05
fanciful imaginary sea voyages to come @ 07.20.05
*dies* @ 07.19.05
more ootp @ 07.17.05
harry potter: driving our children into devil worship @ 07.17.05
