Insanity Disguised as Creativity
Blah blah blah. That's about what I'm coming up with right now.
I'm on this every other day cycle of creativity. Sometimes there's this wild stream of ideas that come at me, and my fingers act like a nozzle, forcing the stream into something effective and directed. Other days there's no nozzle, and I'm just all over the place. Today is definitely a nozzle-free day. The ideas are there, but I'm not in control of them, and the writing feels like some sort of excercise in free-form composition.
This post, for example, is an example of nozzle-free writing. I don't have any good stories at hand, no insights I feel like sharing. Regardless, I could just go on and on and on about absolutely nothing for an indeterminate length of time. I can throw my writing into jamming mode: just give me the theme, and I can go off for hours. My grade school gym teacher used to threaten us with writing 1,000 word essays about life inside a ping-pong ball. I warned him once that I could do it without problem, that I would in fact do it in my spare time. He must have believed me because he started to threaten me instead with having to do the "wall sit." I was able to do that for hours as well, but it was definitely a considerably less enjoyable experience.
Today's writer's block is caused by the fact that Richard Pratt turns out to be the Fascist of the Frontier. (See comments of "Pratt Day 3.") Every approach I take is blocked by this terrible realization, because that name has been attached to the story idea for so long. But, in all honesty, I don't even love it that much. It works insofar as it's a play on my own name, and Pratt is a main street in Lincolnwood, the town where I was born and spent my early childhood. But it sort of rolls off the tongue a little awkwardly--the way you have to return to that "r" sound in quick succession kills the flow of it. I intend on Googling the new name to ensure that it's not associated with some nefarious chapter of history.
So I'm going to get really bombed tonight and bandy about stupid name ideas. This will surely confuse people--a shitfaced guy sitting at the bar, randmonly blurting out invented names. And when they ask me what the hell I'm doing, I'll be quick to respond, "Don't be alarmed; it's only insanity disguised as creativity."
I'm on this every other day cycle of creativity. Sometimes there's this wild stream of ideas that come at me, and my fingers act like a nozzle, forcing the stream into something effective and directed. Other days there's no nozzle, and I'm just all over the place. Today is definitely a nozzle-free day. The ideas are there, but I'm not in control of them, and the writing feels like some sort of excercise in free-form composition.
This post, for example, is an example of nozzle-free writing. I don't have any good stories at hand, no insights I feel like sharing. Regardless, I could just go on and on and on about absolutely nothing for an indeterminate length of time. I can throw my writing into jamming mode: just give me the theme, and I can go off for hours. My grade school gym teacher used to threaten us with writing 1,000 word essays about life inside a ping-pong ball. I warned him once that I could do it without problem, that I would in fact do it in my spare time. He must have believed me because he started to threaten me instead with having to do the "wall sit." I was able to do that for hours as well, but it was definitely a considerably less enjoyable experience.
Today's writer's block is caused by the fact that Richard Pratt turns out to be the Fascist of the Frontier. (See comments of "Pratt Day 3.") Every approach I take is blocked by this terrible realization, because that name has been attached to the story idea for so long. But, in all honesty, I don't even love it that much. It works insofar as it's a play on my own name, and Pratt is a main street in Lincolnwood, the town where I was born and spent my early childhood. But it sort of rolls off the tongue a little awkwardly--the way you have to return to that "r" sound in quick succession kills the flow of it. I intend on Googling the new name to ensure that it's not associated with some nefarious chapter of history.
So I'm going to get really bombed tonight and bandy about stupid name ideas. This will surely confuse people--a shitfaced guy sitting at the bar, randmonly blurting out invented names. And when they ask me what the hell I'm doing, I'll be quick to respond, "Don't be alarmed; it's only insanity disguised as creativity."
posted by Pat at 11:46 AM
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