Insomniathoughts
I've wanted to write this thing for a long time, but always in bouts of insomnia, and never with a keyboard within reach. Well, the urge to write this sordid tale has struck again, and I figured I had enough leeway to wreck my sleeping schedule for the next few days. Lucky me!
A literal few years ago, I wrote on this very journal the words "I wanna be a writer". The wording might have been influenced by a Beatles song I was listening to a lot at the time, but the feeling was genuine. Writing is a thing I enjoy doing, or more precisely, it's a thing I don't find as much of a mind-crushing slog as an alarmingly large proportion of all the "productive" things I could also do, and I guess I've got enough of a narcissistic streak that I sometimes like to marvel at my own finished product.
Whatever I wrote in high school earned me bucketloads of praise, and throughout my entire life, for good or for ill, people have always told me that I "[had] a lot of imagination". For long periods of my life, my main hobby consisted of spending several entire evenings a week throwing paragraphs of prose at people who presumably enjoyed reading them enough that they'd throw prose at me in return. You know, it seemed like a good fit.
But so far? It hasn't really worked out. Some of my frustrations I documented over the years, some not. But two years ago, I signed up for French Lit classes in the hopes that The Greats would provide me some form of guidance on how to write more good, while admittedly helping me stave off the inevitable onslaught of "so what exactly do you do with your life" questions, immediately followed by "so when exactly do you plan to get a real job".
Chapter 1: Littérature française
I started to realize rather early in that I wasn't going to get what I wanted. I wasn't going to learn about books, as in, the things I like to hold and decipher words from, that contain adventures, mysteries and colorful characters and so forth, but litterature, or more precisely littérature. This is important, you see, because "litterature" might refer, in your head, to the sum total of all books, but we French have a thing going where nearly identical words often have a similar but subtly snobbier meaning in our language. No, littérature is only the important books. The good books. Not, you know, Harry Potter bullshit.
Nearly every class in my French Lit program started roughly the same way: with the sentence "What is littérature?" underlined on the chalkboard, and the teacher spending the first class jerking off about that question. The answer to that question, I managed to gather with some cynicism, was twofold: 1- it's littérature because we ("we" meaning a large, nebulous academic ivory tower circlejerk) say so, and 2- what is or isn't littérature is largely, almost wholly dependent on cultural context (see Moby Dick-- reportedly reviled in its time, but now considered a classic) and therefore I might posit that it doesn't matter all that much.
The decision that I never wanted anything to do with littérature was not a conscious one, but it came quickly enough.
It took me a while to articulate it. I never wanted to write to have statues of me built, academic papers written or any of that. I want to create things that people enjoy in some capacity during my lifetime, hopefully while not dying of starvation in the process. That's it. Or, to put it much more snappily: I'd much rather write a best-seller than a timeless masterpiece. The few times I'd said that one out loud got me blank, confused stares from classmates and understanding nods from everyone else.
So the French Lit program wasn't for me. 90% of it was reading anyway, and what little writing we did get done was almost entirely about what we'd just read. So after nearly a year of messing around, I dropped out of it, and instead filled up my following semester with classes cherry-picked to hopefully get me closer to the nuts and bolts of writing. At the center of it was the...
Chapter 2: Atelier: Formes Courtes
The honest-to-goodness "writing classes" were offered as options for students in the litterature program, but there were usually only seats for second and third-year students, who might not get another chance to sign up later. I mostly say this to explain why I wasn't taking this class in the first place, but the following fall semester, I got in (the details of how are a little weird and do not matter).
Truth be told, it WAS closer to what I'd been looking for, but as I should have expected, it still wasn't it. It was, after all, still populated by lit students and teachers. They tried to sell us the same salad as before, but hell, at least we were doing things. As much as I disliked the teacher's style and methods, I was thankful for the practice and the few lessons I did learn.
Overwhelming, though, was the feeling that the teacher just did not... get me. Not me specifically, but my style, my language, my sense of humor, the thoughts that keep me up at night. I'm not so blind as to think some of it wasn't my fault: I was embarassed to realize, very fast, that years and years of writing almost exclusively in (at least mostly correct) english on the internet meant I literally lost some of my french, and that I'd picked up so few books during that period that my overall creativity had taken a hit (at least for things that in no way resemble anime).
But one anecdote solidified my conviction that the teacher and I lived in entirely different worlds: our midterm project was to write a 5-page story with a twist ending, and mine was done at the last minute (after I trashed what I had in mind at first), in part at work (longtime readers of my LJ will remember that the family store has WACKY SURPRISE SCHEDULES). It was a resoundingly all-right story nonetheless, but after I handed it in, it dawned on me that I had sort of ripped off the ending to the Sixth Sense, more or less the most recent defining pop culture "twist ending".
When I joked about that to the teacher (I got a better grade than I expected on it), she revealed to me two things: she did not actually understand the ending's supernatural implication and imagined a different twist entirely (whoops, but I guess that worked out??) and she had not only never seen, but never heard of the Sixth Sense, or M. Night Shyamalan for that matter. I'm not particularly a fan of the movie or the guy, but okay, what the hell kind of pop culture-snubbing cavern do you need to live in to have never heard of them?!
I made it out of that class alive, though with the distinct feeling that most of the advice I'd been given would just not apply at all to what I've been going for with my writing. My final text was a darkly humorous story about a killer robot working at a fast-food restaurant, and one of the comments given was along the lines of "the robot's impossible story works rather well". For some reason it stood out in my mind.
Some of the writing exercises and assignments we'd been given (I might write about those in the future, they're funny but only in hindsight) left me feeling inadequate, uncreative and even humiliated, but I guess it all averaged out to okay.
Sidenote: a technical writing class I'd also taken that semester, almost as an afterthought, ironically wound up being about a lot more than technical writing, and leaving me feeling a LOT more educated on writing than the actual writing class. I learned writing techniques, concision (though probably not enough, ha ha ha!), ways to convey emphasis or emotion, characterization, dialogue... We also got a short story assignment for that one, which was reviewed by peers (ostensibly for grammatical and stylistic mistakes and such) and one of the copies I got back from mine came very little short of outright taking a dump on what I wrote, under cover of anonimity. I am honestly still a little bitter about this one.
Anyway, in the spring semester, I signed up for...
Chapter 3: Atelier: Formes Libres
"Pretentious" is a word that gets tossed around a lot, apparently wrongfully so because when people use it they don't stick to the word's actual definition with its connotiations of insincerity. Still, what people mean when they use that word is valid, I think: when you say someone is pretentious, you're calling their speech impenetrable, condescending, possibly even elitist. And that's no good.
This class, for the four weeks I attended it, was the single most pretentious thing I have seen in my entire life up to this point.
The first class opened with a preamble about how you cannot teach writing, yet university students kept clamoring for writing classes. What a paradox! Because after all, as the very stereotype of the misanthropic starving artist added from the back of the class, every great writer hated school. What a paradox. But we were going to try and learn anyway, and to that, we would spend fifteen weeks looking for...
le réel.
These last two years awakened the anti-intellectual within me, and did so with a vengeance. I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, but here was a teacher who made me feel like a fucking caveman by comparison, and after four weeks, I wanted nothing to do with it anymore. I wasn't going to spend fifteen weeks on a fucking butterfly hunt for something with a name like "le réel" that apparently couldn't translate to "reality" or "truth". (Academia has a thing going where words you thought you knew are used to illustrate new, apparently mindblowing concepts only tangentially related to said word.)
Worst of all, this class rubbed in my face a fact I've been annoyed by since as far back as elementary school: I do not get capital-A Art. I do not think I will ever get Art. You know, the kind you can feel with your gut, but only if you're smart enough. Honestly, I don't think I even WANT to get Art. Hell, here's an excerpt of a thing we had to read:
Tottering through the failing memory falling syllabes of one other language,that is to say one language,and another,and try another,please.
Looking back.I must,at the unbearable,or bearable,or predictable repitiousness of mind.Remember?something like:
(One room,white,quite,long,drawn,over,a
pure curve of skull.)1976?
Yeah. Yeah.
Epilogue: A tangent about Gigi Digi(???)
When I was doing that internship during which I took a lunch break to write "I wanna be a writer", I read what would wind up the final update of the Persona 4 comic posted on the "hiimdaisy" Livejournal (which I'm not linking because it's been erased). This feels both like ages and not that long ago.
Since then, Gigi Digi, as she now calls herself, draws Cucumber Quest, a comic that's as adorable as it is funny. It's been going for over two years, it has an enormous, loyal fanbase and has two successful book-printing Kickstarters under its belt. Gigi has deleted the accounts that hosted her old video game comics, has taken great pains to distance her new work from them, and has expressed frustration at speaking to fans who want her to go back to video game comics and aren't interested in what she does now. They say great artists never look back. From that point of view, it's admirable.
The reason I bring it up is because the strange convergence of internship-related memories only highlights how little I've gotten done in the meantime myself. I've been spinning my wheels with very little to show for it, while an artist I admire (though, well, not in the same domain at all) has figuratively burnt down the bridges to their past work and now has a success story that stands on its own merits. It's both enheartening and frustrating, in a strange way.
Epilogue: so what now
At this point, I feel like I have far more capacity to erase and cross out, to criticize or even mock, to overanalyze, to worry about potential Problematics, to agonize over the placement of a comma, than any capacity to create, to sit down and write something, to take that goddamn ever-essential first step.
It sucks!! And I don't know, truth be told, if I'll be giving these classes another shot next semester. I might, if people are still interested, try to get underway that collab short story collection project thing underway sometime in the future. But for now, I guess I'll go get some sleep.
A literal few years ago, I wrote on this very journal the words "I wanna be a writer". The wording might have been influenced by a Beatles song I was listening to a lot at the time, but the feeling was genuine. Writing is a thing I enjoy doing, or more precisely, it's a thing I don't find as much of a mind-crushing slog as an alarmingly large proportion of all the "productive" things I could also do, and I guess I've got enough of a narcissistic streak that I sometimes like to marvel at my own finished product.
Whatever I wrote in high school earned me bucketloads of praise, and throughout my entire life, for good or for ill, people have always told me that I "[had] a lot of imagination". For long periods of my life, my main hobby consisted of spending several entire evenings a week throwing paragraphs of prose at people who presumably enjoyed reading them enough that they'd throw prose at me in return. You know, it seemed like a good fit.
But so far? It hasn't really worked out. Some of my frustrations I documented over the years, some not. But two years ago, I signed up for French Lit classes in the hopes that The Greats would provide me some form of guidance on how to write more good, while admittedly helping me stave off the inevitable onslaught of "so what exactly do you do with your life" questions, immediately followed by "so when exactly do you plan to get a real job".
Chapter 1: Littérature française
I started to realize rather early in that I wasn't going to get what I wanted. I wasn't going to learn about books, as in, the things I like to hold and decipher words from, that contain adventures, mysteries and colorful characters and so forth, but litterature, or more precisely littérature. This is important, you see, because "litterature" might refer, in your head, to the sum total of all books, but we French have a thing going where nearly identical words often have a similar but subtly snobbier meaning in our language. No, littérature is only the important books. The good books. Not, you know, Harry Potter bullshit.
Nearly every class in my French Lit program started roughly the same way: with the sentence "What is littérature?" underlined on the chalkboard, and the teacher spending the first class jerking off about that question. The answer to that question, I managed to gather with some cynicism, was twofold: 1- it's littérature because we ("we" meaning a large, nebulous academic ivory tower circlejerk) say so, and 2- what is or isn't littérature is largely, almost wholly dependent on cultural context (see Moby Dick-- reportedly reviled in its time, but now considered a classic) and therefore I might posit that it doesn't matter all that much.
The decision that I never wanted anything to do with littérature was not a conscious one, but it came quickly enough.
It took me a while to articulate it. I never wanted to write to have statues of me built, academic papers written or any of that. I want to create things that people enjoy in some capacity during my lifetime, hopefully while not dying of starvation in the process. That's it. Or, to put it much more snappily: I'd much rather write a best-seller than a timeless masterpiece. The few times I'd said that one out loud got me blank, confused stares from classmates and understanding nods from everyone else.
So the French Lit program wasn't for me. 90% of it was reading anyway, and what little writing we did get done was almost entirely about what we'd just read. So after nearly a year of messing around, I dropped out of it, and instead filled up my following semester with classes cherry-picked to hopefully get me closer to the nuts and bolts of writing. At the center of it was the...
Chapter 2: Atelier: Formes Courtes
The honest-to-goodness "writing classes" were offered as options for students in the litterature program, but there were usually only seats for second and third-year students, who might not get another chance to sign up later. I mostly say this to explain why I wasn't taking this class in the first place, but the following fall semester, I got in (the details of how are a little weird and do not matter).
Truth be told, it WAS closer to what I'd been looking for, but as I should have expected, it still wasn't it. It was, after all, still populated by lit students and teachers. They tried to sell us the same salad as before, but hell, at least we were doing things. As much as I disliked the teacher's style and methods, I was thankful for the practice and the few lessons I did learn.
Overwhelming, though, was the feeling that the teacher just did not... get me. Not me specifically, but my style, my language, my sense of humor, the thoughts that keep me up at night. I'm not so blind as to think some of it wasn't my fault: I was embarassed to realize, very fast, that years and years of writing almost exclusively in (at least mostly correct) english on the internet meant I literally lost some of my french, and that I'd picked up so few books during that period that my overall creativity had taken a hit (at least for things that in no way resemble anime).
But one anecdote solidified my conviction that the teacher and I lived in entirely different worlds: our midterm project was to write a 5-page story with a twist ending, and mine was done at the last minute (after I trashed what I had in mind at first), in part at work (longtime readers of my LJ will remember that the family store has WACKY SURPRISE SCHEDULES). It was a resoundingly all-right story nonetheless, but after I handed it in, it dawned on me that I had sort of ripped off the ending to the Sixth Sense, more or less the most recent defining pop culture "twist ending".
When I joked about that to the teacher (I got a better grade than I expected on it), she revealed to me two things: she did not actually understand the ending's supernatural implication and imagined a different twist entirely (whoops, but I guess that worked out??) and she had not only never seen, but never heard of the Sixth Sense, or M. Night Shyamalan for that matter. I'm not particularly a fan of the movie or the guy, but okay, what the hell kind of pop culture-snubbing cavern do you need to live in to have never heard of them?!
I made it out of that class alive, though with the distinct feeling that most of the advice I'd been given would just not apply at all to what I've been going for with my writing. My final text was a darkly humorous story about a killer robot working at a fast-food restaurant, and one of the comments given was along the lines of "the robot's impossible story works rather well". For some reason it stood out in my mind.
Some of the writing exercises and assignments we'd been given (I might write about those in the future, they're funny but only in hindsight) left me feeling inadequate, uncreative and even humiliated, but I guess it all averaged out to okay.
Sidenote: a technical writing class I'd also taken that semester, almost as an afterthought, ironically wound up being about a lot more than technical writing, and leaving me feeling a LOT more educated on writing than the actual writing class. I learned writing techniques, concision (though probably not enough, ha ha ha!), ways to convey emphasis or emotion, characterization, dialogue... We also got a short story assignment for that one, which was reviewed by peers (ostensibly for grammatical and stylistic mistakes and such) and one of the copies I got back from mine came very little short of outright taking a dump on what I wrote, under cover of anonimity. I am honestly still a little bitter about this one.
Anyway, in the spring semester, I signed up for...
Chapter 3: Atelier: Formes Libres
"Pretentious" is a word that gets tossed around a lot, apparently wrongfully so because when people use it they don't stick to the word's actual definition with its connotiations of insincerity. Still, what people mean when they use that word is valid, I think: when you say someone is pretentious, you're calling their speech impenetrable, condescending, possibly even elitist. And that's no good.
This class, for the four weeks I attended it, was the single most pretentious thing I have seen in my entire life up to this point.
The first class opened with a preamble about how you cannot teach writing, yet university students kept clamoring for writing classes. What a paradox! Because after all, as the very stereotype of the misanthropic starving artist added from the back of the class, every great writer hated school. What a paradox. But we were going to try and learn anyway, and to that, we would spend fifteen weeks looking for...
le réel.
These last two years awakened the anti-intellectual within me, and did so with a vengeance. I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, but here was a teacher who made me feel like a fucking caveman by comparison, and after four weeks, I wanted nothing to do with it anymore. I wasn't going to spend fifteen weeks on a fucking butterfly hunt for something with a name like "le réel" that apparently couldn't translate to "reality" or "truth". (Academia has a thing going where words you thought you knew are used to illustrate new, apparently mindblowing concepts only tangentially related to said word.)
Worst of all, this class rubbed in my face a fact I've been annoyed by since as far back as elementary school: I do not get capital-A Art. I do not think I will ever get Art. You know, the kind you can feel with your gut, but only if you're smart enough. Honestly, I don't think I even WANT to get Art. Hell, here's an excerpt of a thing we had to read:
Tottering through the failing memory falling syllabes of one other language,that is to say one language,and another,and try another,please.
Looking back.I must,at the unbearable,or bearable,or predictable repitiousness of mind.Remember?something like:
(One room,white,quite,long,drawn,over,a
pure curve of skull.)1976?
Yeah. Yeah.
Epilogue: A tangent about Gigi Digi(???)
When I was doing that internship during which I took a lunch break to write "I wanna be a writer", I read what would wind up the final update of the Persona 4 comic posted on the "hiimdaisy" Livejournal (which I'm not linking because it's been erased). This feels both like ages and not that long ago.
Since then, Gigi Digi, as she now calls herself, draws Cucumber Quest, a comic that's as adorable as it is funny. It's been going for over two years, it has an enormous, loyal fanbase and has two successful book-printing Kickstarters under its belt. Gigi has deleted the accounts that hosted her old video game comics, has taken great pains to distance her new work from them, and has expressed frustration at speaking to fans who want her to go back to video game comics and aren't interested in what she does now. They say great artists never look back. From that point of view, it's admirable.
The reason I bring it up is because the strange convergence of internship-related memories only highlights how little I've gotten done in the meantime myself. I've been spinning my wheels with very little to show for it, while an artist I admire (though, well, not in the same domain at all) has figuratively burnt down the bridges to their past work and now has a success story that stands on its own merits. It's both enheartening and frustrating, in a strange way.
Epilogue: so what now
At this point, I feel like I have far more capacity to erase and cross out, to criticize or even mock, to overanalyze, to worry about potential Problematics, to agonize over the placement of a comma, than any capacity to create, to sit down and write something, to take that goddamn ever-essential first step.
It sucks!! And I don't know, truth be told, if I'll be giving these classes another shot next semester. I might, if people are still interested, try to get underway that collab short story collection project thing underway sometime in the future. But for now, I guess I'll go get some sleep.