Ode to shit

what happened to babe © Lilly Schwartz 2011

In its natural state, life is pretty balanced. Shit gives rise to the complexity of life and life again produces shit. It’s waves and waves of life, shit and death that all interrelate somehow and make sure that shit and corpses don’t take over the world. Without the continuation of life the world would gradually decay until it was just covered in corpses and dung that eventually decompose into some kind of goo. At least that’s how I imagine the end of all life. Some call this movement towards the ultimate final goo the second law of thermodynamics, some call it entropy, and other less fair-minded people, like me, just call it the shit we have to deal with, mainly because ‘shit’ is such a short and poignant word.

What people tend to forget is that shit, corpses and death are utterly necessary for life to even exist. Not plants or insects are at the bottom of the food chain, shit and corpses are. There is all the ugly iffy type of life that birds eat all the time, worms and insects and these wouldn’t exist without heaps and heaps of dung and dead goo. There is a somewhat disgusting, somewhat beautiful relationship between life and death that needs to be spelled out in these terms somehow, so that people are reminded of how life really works and make their choices accordingly.

We go into a supermarket and buy a piece of flesh from an animal that was at some point a living, breathing entity. This being had a mother and possibly big eyes that let humans go “Awww cuuute”, because we’re genetically inclined to care for cuddly little things with big eyes. Well, until one day the cuddly little thing isn’t little or cuddly anymore, and then we have it for dinner. Just, that nowadays people don’t even see anymore that they’re eating a part of a corpse, unless someone makes it real obvious and sells a whole dead piglet. Yes, we eat corpses. Chilled corpses maybe, but still, we have something in common with the worms and insects that are at the bottom of the food chain. We don’t want to be reminded of it, but it is true nonetheless.

We don’t want to see corpses, we don’t want to see death in its reality. We don’t want to be reminded that one day the worms and insects are going to get us all, unless we give ourselves to the fires of hell, no wait, the fires of the crematories. We wax our relatives up, paint their faces so that they somehow don’t look so dead. We don’t leave them lying around until they start to look somewhat disgusting, no we chill them and then we bury them six feet under. It’s more hygienic that way.

The same we do with shit. It goes down the toilet and is flushed somewhere, God knows where, and that’s the last we see of it. Dog shit lies in the street and we feel inclined to fine the dog owners if they don’t make the shit disappear. It’s just not very nice is it? We don’t want to see shit, just like we don’t want to see corpses and dead relatives being eaten by worms.

However, without corpses we don’t get our steak or Sunday roast. Without shit there is no food chain, no life, no world as we know it and sometimes it’s important to spell it out. Even our own deaths are necessary, because without it there is no room for the children of our children.

Now, the problem with avoiding shit, death and corpses all the time is that we tend to forget how to live. We don’t take risks that might get us killed. We eat only healthy food that doesn’t make us happy, we take all the excesses out, the extremes, the jumping of cliffs, hitchhiking with strangers, walking through parks alone at night. Those might even be reasonable precautions, but what’s even worse is that take it one step further. We don’t do stuff that involves paddling through valleys of shit. With this I mean that we try to avoid doing things that confront us with heaps of stuff that we don’t want to do. Maybe it’s bureaucracy, maybe it’s talking in front of a lot of people, maybe marketing or putting yourself on the line. And we all try to avoid this shit as much as possible, because it scares us.

Without shit, there is no beauty though. Musicians have to face the whole industry if they want their albums to be bought. And without their albums being bought, they will stop being musicians, unless they’re terribly idealistic and have too much time on their hands. Full-time musicians have to go on the road to play shows, with the right timing, the right publicity and terribly uncomfortable circumstances. They have to face labels and even the worst of the worst, music journalists, who to musicians often seem like vultures, because they turn the words in your mouth so that it actually gets them a story, even if there is none. Also writers have to face similar things. They face the critics, the publishing industry, book signings, reading tours, book fairs and the likes. No job is without its own valley of shit that you continually have to cross, just to get to the blooming mountains with dew sprinkled flowers.

The point is, those dew sprinkled flowers are worth it. How many people end up doing a job they hate, because they didn’t want to be facing one of these big and obvious valleys of shit? And how many of them still cross their own version of this valley every day? Annoying customers, bosses, efficiency ratings, monthly and yearly appraisals, layoffs, backstabbing co-workers and the rut of producing shit that nobody really needs anyway. And no dew sprinkled flowers whatsoever, because in the end you just look back and think “Whoever needed the crap I wasted my life with for the last 45 years?”

Whatever you do, there is shit all around, and that’s normal. Shit can only be avoided, by not living life altogether. The question really is, whether you want to spend your life waist deep in shit shovelling it from one side to the other, or whether you want to build a boat and enjoy the flowers on the other side. Either way, we just have to accept the shit, the corpses, even the worms, the insects and the vultures, because it’s all part of the circle of life. What we do with that is our own choice though.

And even if this all might sound somewhat dreary and depressing, from time to time someone actually has to write an ode to all this shit, because it’s all around us and somehow it fulfils its function. It enables us to live and do the things we like, even though we find it all pretty disgusting and terrible if we give it too much thought. And here it comes, an ode to the shit we all have to deal with, day in and day out:

It’s an ode

Oh, it’s an ode
to the trains that are late every day,
the dumb students you have to teach,
the idiots to whom you serve food,
to abusive customers all over the planet
and to all the pathetic bosses who don’t know shit,
to the people who walk slowly right in front of you
although it’s obvious that you’re in a hurry.

It’s an ode
to the tax return forms,
or your apathetic unemployment agency case worker,
to the nonsensical phone calls that keep you from working productively
and your old computer at work that keeps crashing,
the rancid coffee in the office that smells somewhat burnt
and the milk that has gone off again
because you’re never home.

It’s an ode
to the cat that always jumps on the table
although you keep telling it to get down,
to the screaming kids on all the airplanes in the world,
to your neighbours who wear high heels in their flat,
to the squeaking door in your office,
or the architects who enjoyed designing a building without windows,
to the oil refinery of which your town stinks
and the flatmates who steal your orange juice.

It’s an ode to this,
and to all the other lovely shit that keeps driving you insane.

And now you better go back to paddling, my little sailors.

Storytelling in the world of film

For quite a few years I’ve been embarking on little journey’s into the world of film.

I always loved going to the cinema. It has so many nice moments. There are the almost whispering conversations before the ads start, the snarky comments about the bad ice cream commercials, the trailers – half of them entirely laughable -, the smell of the popcorn, the slightly sticky and sick feeling after too much of the stuff, the dazzling light when you come out of a dark movie theatre into the sunshine of a dull afternoon. It’s all pretty fantastic.

When I was a teenager I came to identify the years by certain movies that came out during that time. I bought soundtracks and there was a certain feel to them that changed over the years as the popular music changed. I even had times when I had to wait for new movies to come out, because I had seen all the ones that were being shown at the time. There was also a cheap cinema in town where you could see a movie for what would be now about 1.50€. We went there regardless of the movie on Friday nights before hitting the clubs. I’ve seen some of the worst movies there, but also some really good ones, all accompanied by some beers that we smuggled in there in our backpacks.

Then there was the time when movies became available on DVD. For my family VHS was a bit of a disaster, because my parents bought a VHS recorder produced by Mitsubishi. Motorbikes they can produce maybe, but stay away from their consumer electronics, it was broken most of the time. DVDs were different though, because I could watch them on my computer and there I usually stayed in control myself instead of letting my parents pick. I became pretty obsessed with DVDs and for a while I would buy a cheap DVD a week, watch them over and over, and it somehow made the movie experience more personal. And suddenly I wasn’t depending on the TV program anymore or on what was playing in the cinemas. It gave me back the control over what I wanted to watch.

How much the perception of the world changes with the different media available! It’s really quite interesting to imagine how different everything would have been for me if I were born 50 years earlier with the newsreel still on in the cinemas, during the time before television. Nowadays we have all this information at our fingertips and we can watch all sorts of movies that would have been unavailable to us before the advent of video, or even more crazy, the internet. The movie industry and the TV networks don’t have the control anymore over what we watch. No wonder that people don’t go to the cinema to watch silly films anymore. They can sit at home and have their pick of the really good movies instead. However, it’s also not necessarily always a good change either. Nowadays we don’t make a big event of watching a film anymore, which is a shame, really. We watch them while we cook or eat and often we even stop them half way through and do something else before we continue watching. The whole experience is different now, less of a special occasion.

Especially during some of the more boring and lonely times during my first year at the University of Sussex I would get movies from the Film Studies Library and watch them while I was eating lunch. I just hated eating alone, so that was my attempt of being surrounded by fictional characters at least. During that time I even attended a few Film Studies courses, sat in lecture theatres watching movies for university credit points and in the end I wrote pretty pathetic analyses. People think studying Film would have to be something pretty fun for someone like me, who loves cinema, but in fact it was pretty much torture. I was much more interested in watching movies than in writing about them, especially academically. And then there was also the problem that we didn’t just watch good movies. Some of them were supposed to show us certain topics in Film Theory and suddenly you end up watching pretty daft movies with lots of silly racism and exotism in them, just so that we stupid little students understand what exotism is. I also had a course on British cinema and that was probably one of the worst experiences ever, since a lot of the famous British films are just war propaganda. Of course I then had to hold a presentation about one of these boring war movies and started making fun of how some German infiltrators were portrayed. My goodness, they actually demanded to get coffee, barbarians! All in all Film Studies takes all the fun out of watching movies in my view.

A different perspective on film was one of my creative writing courses at university. It was a course on scriptwriting and so I spent a couple of weekends obsessing about character sheets and structure, but nothing much came of it. Somehow I couldn’t press my own vision to fit the format. I just wasn’t that much into the idea of writing like this anyway. I’m a quite visual person, so film probably wouldn’t be the wrong medium, but I need less rigid constraints for my writing. Externally visible behaviour, that’s the constraint that I find difficult. I find stories much more interesting in which something fundamentally changes without anything obvious happening at all.

So, everything those academic film courses did for me was to convince me that film is not my medium somehow. I don’t want to write about film, neither critically nor academically, and so far I also didn’t manage to get into writing screenplays at all. There is still this fundamental obsession with the moving pictures though, but I think it’s all based on the story telling aspects of it. I watch movies mainly because I’m addicted to stories and certain ways of telling them.

I’m interested in all sorts of different types of movies, although I certainly have some favourites. For a while I was pretty obsessed with Woody Allen movies. I watched almost all of them and I think what makes them so compelling is precisely what some people find annoying about them: The utterly crazy characters. In fiction you can come up with totally exaggerated characters and often you can even get away with that, it just fascinates me. Woody Allen movies show mostly extreme examples of this, because he writes mostly comedy. I’m interested in these movies not because of their comedy aspects, but mostly because of the extreme characters in them. Some people like to write about extraordinary things happening to normal everyday people, but I’m not interested in normal people at all. I like crazy characters, extreme examples of stereotypes or the worst anti-heroes. They make for interesting stories, although they are in some sense not even really believable. And that’s another thing I’m interested in: When does a character become unbelievable? How crazy do things have to get for us to say: Nah, that’s bullshit! And when do we stop or even start to sympathise with anti-heroes? Where is the borderline between normal and fucked up, between believable and unbelievable, when do we conclude that someone is nothing more than a pathetic asshole?

At the moment I’m really into watching old black and white movies, mostly Film Noir from the 40s and 50s. I set myself the goal to watch all the films on a list of 250 Film Noir movies and I’m hoping that it will tell me something more about my questions, since Film Noir is full of extreme characters. It’s my latest little journey into the world of film, but again it’s all about the story telling. And maybe one day I even figure out how to overcome my problems with the constraints of scriptwriting.

Kamikaze promotion strategies

Buying second hand books online can really give you some fits of anger sometimes, especially when there is a mixup and you end up receiving something completely unrelated. In my case I battle this emotion with writing sarcastic little emails to the seller. I will probably never hear from this one again:

Dear #fill-in-ridiculous-username#,

After already waiting half a month for the book I ordered – Royal Mail at its best I guess – I finally received *the wrong book*. I ordered Bad Seed: The Biography of Nick Cave and the book I actually got was Steven W. Mosher, A Mother’s Ordeal, something about the Chinese One Couple One Child policy. Since I actually needed the book I ordered about a week ago and the complete unrelatedness of the two books is utterly laughable, I can only see this as a sign to take my business elsewhere.

If the book I actually ordered is returned from a similar odyssey or found somewhere, you can obviously send it to me if you wish. However, until then I’m holding this “lasting piece of literature” I received from you as a hostage. In case the other book doesn’t show up, you can keep the money by the way, since my floor is somewhat crooked and maybe I can use my hostage to stabilise my desk or something.

Reading the book? No thanks. China is seriously overpopulated and it’s a semi-totalitarian state, tough luck. My goodness though, who needs to read a book about that nowadays, almost 20 years after the book was first published? And especially when other people are held prisoner for having the wrong political views or, oh god even worse, when other people are being exploited under terrible conditions in the Apple factories? Seems to me that in the book which you erroneously sent to me all is well in the end. So I can only congratulate everyone involved on coping well with the difficulties of their lives, well done! Apart from that it seems to me more like the proverbial Chinese bag of rice.

I conclude therefore that “hostage” is probably not even a very accurate choice of word, since probably nobody would be terribly bothered about the book staying in my custody. I guess if there actually was a mixup, the person who in the end received my book would say to himself: “Blimey! Never mind that shoddy other cheap thing I ordered; this is actually much more interesting!” Maybe I even got someone interested in Mr. Cave, who knows! So, in the end I am almost certain that all will be well without even lifting a finger, how nice! And on this note …

So long and thanks for nothing,
…

Still, this actually gives me a rather weird strategy of promoting my novel. It would go like this: I could pose as a seller of silly books and then I just send all them silly people my book instead. I guess that at least a part of the buyers will not bother with all the hassle of returning it …

Scrivener and the shades of yellow and green

Did I mention that I’m using Scrivener to write my novel? So far I’m not using many of its functions, since I’m just writing scene after scene at the moment. However, I think the label functions and the cork board view are going to be very good to keep track of the editing, which I will start in April.

One nice function of Scrivener, which I’m already using every day is the project target functionality. You can set yourself a word target for the whole project and also one for the day and then it will colour code on a progress bar where you stand with regards to your target. You can also set yourself a deadline and it will calculate how much you have to write each day to reach your goal. It’s really a rather nice feature that gives you a nice visual feedback of your progress. The progress bar floats on top of the writing window, so that it is also still visible even when you’re in composition mode, which is how they call their distraction free writing environment.

I have to say that I haven’t been using composition mode much, because by default it has a really weird scrolling behaviour. It keeps the cursor in the middle of the screen when you’re writing, even if you scrolled further down or up. Often this causes awkward jumping and especially if you write like me, all over the place, never continuously one sentence after the next, it can get pretty annoying. Only today I finally found out how to turn this behaviour off, thanks to Daniel Wessel’s blog post. They have hidden it pretty well. Who actually thinks of looking in the hidden menu bar? So, from tomorrow I will be writing distraction free again.

I think today the colour of the progress bar for my project target went from a very greenish yellow to a very yellowish green, so I think I’m actually getting there. 2/3 of the novel are written now, but the second part isn’t quite finished yet. That the word count doesn’t quite reflect the structure is mainly because I have written some scenes and dialogues for the third part already, although I’ve been mostly working linearly when it comes to the scenes. Now I actually still have a few scenes to go before I can embark on the part of the story that contains more dialogue and action.

Every part is supposed to reveal a slightly novel aspect of the story that makes the characters change a little bit. At this point the protagonist is probably the only one, who isn’t a flat character, although I’m still working on how to make the second lead develop to a certain extent as well, at least in the perception of the protagonist. It’s hard to see yet, whether that’s going to work out, because it has to mainly happen in the third part that isn’t written yet. However, I guess that’s how it still remains interesting for me, since I don’t know everything about the characters yet. Just today I had a nice idea for my protagonist that just somehow came about while I was writing. Just think, after I’ve been working with the same character for a month, he still is a riddle to me! At least when it comes to certain aspects that aren’t quite fleshed out yet.

I actually think that if I knew the whole story in all its details I probably would never bother writing it, because the process would be boring. This happened to me a lot with the technical reports I had to write for university. If you already know the whole thing by heart and know all the aspects of your results too well, it becomes really boring to write. However, this way, where I’m still developing the story as I go, it’s a kind of discovery for myself as well. It keeps things interesting.

54363 / 80000 (67.95%)

About the muse

Nick Cave said in an interview that he sacked his muse and started to go to an office instead. I think that’s the way to go. Or maybe not quite. The muse can’t be sacked. Either you have her around or you don’t. You can’t control her anyway. Sometimes you can work with her, but mostly she works with you, and only if you’re lucky. It’s the same as what I wrote about the zone. You can’t always be in it, or you go mad. And you can’t always play with the muse, she’ll break you. There is something to be said about continuous hard work though. Even if you sit there and it’s boring and you stare at the screen or your notepad with hate, there is something worthwhile in the struggle with it all. Maybe an idea comes, maybe you have to cut it out of your fingers, bleed it onto the page, but no matter how you got there, it’s an idea nonetheless. And working with ideas, making something good out of them, that’s what you need the hard work for. You sit and toil over your words. And in the end you just want to delete it all, or crumple it all up, set fire to it, destroy it, but if you don’t, and if you let it sit for a while, maybe you realise that it’s a start. And if you stop hating yourself for a while, or dial the self-loathing down a notch at least, then maybe you will let yourself get somewhere, maybe even somewhere good.

I look at what I’ve written today and smile. It’s angry, it’s juicy, and it’s not perfect, but somehow it’s all starting to make sense, to get a certain shape and it feels as if there are not so many blanks to fill in now. I still have half a month to torture myself with this and I have decided to stay away from the outside world for this time, hide in my flat, type away and not let myself be distracted. What I’m writing has a certain flavour and if I go out there and have a good time, maybe go dancing for a bit, I fear that I’m going to lose that flavour, the feel for what it’s like to be my protagonist. My protagonist sits at home alone, so I sit home alone. That’s part of the torture as well. It’s worth it though. This morning I read over this part of the novel and started to see how homogenous it’s starting to become and how much atmosphere it’s starting to have. I’m looking forward to the editing part, because I hope I can then change my routine a bit, go out and enjoy Berlin without losing the flavour of it. By then the flavour will be already in what I’ve written and I just need to work with it, make it stronger or tone it down in places. It seems easier from the writing perspective. I’m suspecting though that it will turn out to be harder than it seems now.

In any case, I’m enjoying the process. Writing this has been a lot of fun and it was much less torture than any of my previous attempts. Maybe the earlier attempts were all too personal, too difficult for a first novel, who knows. This is more distant, more fiction, less autobiographical although I’m starting to see certain autobiographical aspects as well, but more as if I was writing about a caricature of myself. A fictitious me. It’s all a bit strange and unbecoming, if I think of myself actually in this role, but the character I’m talking about has certainly some aspects in common with me at least. However, since I can’t take myself out of the story anyway – after all I’m the author – I might as well appear in it in some form or other. It’s not so bad really. It’s ok as long as I say to myself and everyone else: This is fiction, it never happened. Else people might think that I’m more crazy than I really am.

One last thing: I’ve cracked the 50000 words milestone today! I started writing on the 19th of February and today is the 14th of March, which means that I’ve finished the goal of the National Novel Writing Month even before the month is over. I don’t know how people with fulltime jobs can pull this off, but I know it’s possible. My dad wrote 50000 words in November and he works fulltime. That’s my dad, I’m sure proud of him! I myself won’t stop here and still have 30000 words to go, which is the entire third part of the story and makes for a better length of a novel. That third part will have a lot more dialogue than the other two parts and there will be lots of stuff happening. So, it will be dense, probably pretty messy and it will be difficult to write. At least that’s what I suspect. However, that’s not so bad overall, since so far it has been pretty easy actually. Day in, day out I think: What’s the catch? The big problems must still be coming somewhere, so I’ll better watch my back over the next couple of weeks.

50653 / 80000 (63.32%)

The value of creative work

Today I watched the film The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz, after Blixa Bargeld, the singer of Einstürzende Neubauten, mentioned it positively in an interview. Maybe I should have been warned by that, since Mr. Bargeld moved in “artsy” circles from the very start of his music career. “Artsy” people often find that it’s already good enough when something is different. For me that’s normally just not good enough. Here a little review that I wrote on IMDb. It will probably get rejected, since honesty sometimes automatically leads to “spiteful remarks”, which is against their guidelines. However, I still felt like writing the review, since I already concluded that watching this film was definitely a waste of my lifetime. This way I could at least make it have some value. Well, if “waste of lifetime” counts as spiteful, and some people might say so, then it will be rejected for sure …

Waste of lifetime

With this film I’m actually suspecting an all out con game, an
elaborate joke, since it’s just too nonsensical to even take seriously.
The makers are probably laughing about the fact that people are willing
to give them awards for it.

And even if I see this as comedy, this film still is too incoherent,
too packed full of stuff and it has too many switches in style to even
be watchable. That said, it also doesn’t lack good ideas. I even
laughed a couple of times, but as a whole it’s just overdone, boring
and probably just too low-budget for what it’s trying to do. As soon as
the mythical nonsense starts, all the atmosphere just evaporates.
That’s when I wanted to turn it off. And I should have, since it turned
out to be a waste of my precious lifetime, really.

It’s a shame, since the idea actually had potential, else I wouldn’t
have wanted to watch it in the first place.

Even the comparison with Buñuel in some of the other reviews is
laughable, since Buñuel didn’t aim for just nonsensical. He aimed for
the surreal, which involves much more than ridiculing aspects of
society (although it definitely has a part in it too). It seems that a
lot of “artsy” people haven’t quite noticed the difference between the
two concepts yet.

After writing the review I thought to myself that even if I might be a bit harsh there, maybe I’m still onto an interesting question. It’s obvious that we can’t differentiate between the surreal and the nonsensical with a simple clear-cut scheme, but maybe it’s even more difficult than that. Do we see the worth in a work of creativity only if it makes sense to the beholder? Or is it enough already, if the makers of the film managed to find meaning for themselves in making it? Does the outcome have to be appreciated by the public to really hold up even for the makers? I’m not so sure whether there even can be a general answer to that. Everyone who creates something has to answer this question for themselves, since the “why” is just such an immediate and haunting question. Why even bother? Is my own interest in the end enough or do I give up as soon as I realise that nobody really cares? For me the answer is clear: It only needs one single person, who appreciates the effort and then it was worth it. This person might actually be me as well, if I actually have a good time doing what I’m doing. If it’s noting more than just a drag and nobody else really cares either, then I might as well not do it. However, as long as I’m enjoying the process, it’s definitely worth it. So, if these guys, who produced the film had fun (and it looks like it), then it was at least only a waste of my lifetime.

Staying in the zone

I never had problems with writer’s block. I probably write too much and not too little. The problem is the quality about which I’m never quite sure. Today was probably the first time during this entire experiment of writing the first draft for my novel that I went back to re-write something. I told myself that I wouldn’t do that until I’m editing, because I can be a very harsh critic, when it comes to my own writing. And still, it was just such weak shit! I wrote it last night when I was a bit tired and not in the best mood. I had some inspiration, but in my state of mind I just couldn’t deliver. This morning I looked at it and thought of just deleting it right away, since I wasn’t quite sure where to put the scene anyway. Then it struck me though that it’s exactly what I told myself not to do until I’m done. And interesting enough, although it didn’t fit the general standard, it sort of fits into the mood. There was a place for it in a chapter that isn’t outlined yet, I’m sure of it. So I went back and re-wrote it. The scene became double the initial length, 10 times the amount of imagery and, well, swearing, and now, when I was just reading it out loud to check the flow, it gave me the chills. Not bad at all. Re-writing is fine, as long as you know that you need to add and not to replace. Spending hours replacing one word, is a waste of time. I added mood, atmosphere, coherence and doing it right now was also a good choice. It’s much better than trying to figure out what I was trying to say in a couple of months time, when I will be forced to edit this weak shit anyway. Instead of feeling that I wasted time last night, I now feel I have written something quite good when I combine yesterday’s and today’s efforts.

Earlier I also saw the film Naked Lunch by Cronenberg. In a remote sense it’s actually about writing, but actually it’s more about hallucinations and trying to find inspiration in drugs. I remember that when my mum saw it for the first time she got a blister from disgust, because this typewriter keeps turning into a bug. It’s crazy stuff. Still, it gave me something, a vague inspiration that had nothing to do with its hallucinatory qualities. It was about being in the zone and reaching a quality that makes you wonder where all this stuff came from. Maybe being just crazed by drugs will let you forget, but in fact I had times when I was completely sober and still wrote something utterly unbelievable. The next day, when I read it over, I was just: “Wait, who wrote this stuff?! Couldn’t have been me …” Call it inspiration, divine intervention, delusions, but in the end it just reads as if a higher power was guiding your hand. I guess that’s what writers are not getting, when they’re fighting the writer’s block and delete everything they write a few hours later. It’s less about not being able to write at all and more about feeling that everything you happen to write is just not good enough.

It comes down to this though: Writing a novel continually in the zone is impossible, unless you hurt yourself as much as people like Burroughs did. I don’t even want to be in the zone all the time, because it wouldn’t give me any time to plan my story. I don’t need to scramble to get there either, especially if I believe in my story. The zone will come, eventually when you’re in the right mindset and know what mood you’re trying to create. Ideally all of what I write every day, will get up to the same standard eventually, but until then I can also allow myself to have some weak shit waiting for editing. If then suddenly I end up in the zone, I can break my own rules, no problem. If you need to re-write, you do it. It’s just as important as the urge to write in the first place. The trick is to know when to stop. When to try to get out of the zone, go out, have a life and then come back to sit at your desk in the morning again. It’s knowing when to stop editing. Knowing when you’re too tired to write anything coherent anymore. I’m still working on that kind of knowledge for myself.

44752 / 80000 (55.94%)

 

Vulgar and slightly pornographic

Progress, progress, progress. Yesterday I accidentally wrote a whole scene without using the word “fuck” once. When I noticed that, I was so shocked that I had to change the scene this morning. Tells you something about that writing style of mine. When I told a good friend yesterday that what I was writing was “vulgar and slightly pornographic” he said “I know, that’s what I gathered when you said you’re writing again …” Haha.

So, yesterday:

37396 / 80000 (46.74%)

Today then the great surprise that I was about to crack the 40000 words, so 50% of my novel. This milestone crept up on me somehow without me noticing. The second lead character is getting more shape now, although most of the things that are known are things that this person doesn’t do. The scene about the things this person doesn’t do was quite a fun scene to write, because it’s reasonably difficult to describe these things people don’t do without being boring. It’s like the pink elephant you’re not supposed to think about. Writing about the things people don’t do, makes explicit how much can be said about us even by just observing our non-behaviour. Very strange. I should write a short story about someone who doesn’t do certain things. It would probably be fun and a cool experiment to still have a sort of change in the character within the story.

With my scene about the things the second lead character doesn’t do, I didn’t manage to crack the 40000. I cracked it with a description of the colour grey. There is quite a lot to say about this colour, mainly because it’s so versatile. 40000 words. Quite an achievement! And I’m still on track to finish the first draft on the 01.04.2012. I have to write 1900 words on average every day to make this deadline. So far I’ve not been having many problems to achieve that, since the story seems to be coming naturally to me.

Today:

40057 / 80000 (50.07%)

 

The flavour of real people

What I am writing at the moment is supposed to capture a certain mood, which wafts through certain parts of society. It’s the mood of those, who are disappointed now, because even the good jobs nowadays make you feel useless and as if you’re wasting your time. Underneath it all there lies a certain truth. Namely that whatever you do, you’re trying to sell people crap they don’t really need. We need food and shelter, and then only when that is covered, we can even start to think about whether our work is fulfilling or not, or whether we even want something like an iPad. No amount of cash or shiny objects will ever make us happy, even if advertising tells us otherwise. No, it’s fundamentally what we ourselves do with our lives that matters. Living with dignity helps, so that you don’t have to apply for benefits even though you have a 40 hour job. Being valued, really valued helps. Not being a hamster in a pointless wheel helps. Doing something that you enjoy and makes you feel as if you’re contributing something worthwhile to society, that’s what has the potential for happiness. A lot of people don’t ever have a shot at something like that and this is at the core of what I’m writing. There is a lot of sarcasm in it and a lot of universal truths that are demonstrated with someone, whose life is shit for no fault of his own.

There are some very odd characters in it generally, interesting people you might not ever meet in real life, but they all have people I know as a basis. None of them is inspired by one single person, they’re all mixtures of different people, who have the characteristics of a certain type of person, who is trying and trying, but never really gets ahead. I’m trying to make these people more than stereotypes, because they are fleshed out with details, with conflicting emotions that make them inconsistent, like the real people out there. That’s where I’m trying to get, capturing the flavour of certain people, without copying them one to one. And every one of them expresses this fundamental need for meaning that society is failing to provide somehow, although they themselves also all fail differently at their attempts to live a different life. It’s not so easy, really, but I’m having a lot of fun writing it. I can criticise a lot of things, because they stay the opinion of the story teller, which might or might not be my own opinion. I can make fun of a lot of things and to be honest I’m also expecting to piss people off in the process. Fundamentally though, I’m just trying to tell a story of those people, who end up never getting what they really want, because that’s just how their life works.

I’m making good progress. Last night I couldn’t sleep until late and ended up working a scene over and over until it had just the right attitude to it. I was tired, so it was difficult, but in the end I closed the laptop at 2.30 am and was finally happy with what I had written. 2400 words again and 2 scenes. It feels as if there is still a lot of work to be done, but I’m progressing with the writing. Soon I will be halfway through.

35178 / 80000 (43.97%)

Thanks, universe …

I had a few slow days with only some hundred words each, but today I got back into it and managed to write over 2000 again, finishing two scenes. I’m still on schedule for having the first draft all ready at the beginning of April. That is if I keep up the work and stick to the word count.

These days I’m mainly having difficulty with some of the filler scenes that drag the story along, but don’t let me shine with nice details. I’m not good at writing stuff that goes “and then this and that happened”. Those are the scenes that will need the most work in editing I guess.

By the way, the second lead character appeared now and that’s going to be fun as well. It’s still mainly focused on the main protagonist, but I’m fleshing the second lead out now with backstory. It’s all very distanced still. The character is there, but not many concrete things are known. I will keep this character the mystery throughout actually and the protagonist will never even find out a name.

In the third part another few people will appear and until then I should probably get some grip on the “this and that happened” bits. After that going back to the filler scenes for editing should be much easier actually. I can’t believe I’m already 40% into this project. How did that happen? All these years I’ve been trying to get up on a story that was flowing like this one. I guess the universe is giving me a break for a change.

32787 / 80000 (40.98%)