Odd, I have to force myself to write. Nine days without power and all the previous years cultivating of habit all shot to shit. I use a journal exactly the same way as everyone else, sort of, and in a different way than most. If you say enough things, any things, evidentially you’ll say something you kind of like, and so I’ve tried to discipline myself to writing every day whether I feel like it or not.
After a while it’s habit, the question of “feeling” doesn’t come into it at all. I think my habit was derailed. If I had advice, and I’m sure I do I just don’t like taking advice and assume neither does anyone else, it’d be not to wait for inspiration to strike. Inspiration will strike, it’d really suck if you didn’t know what to do with it.
That’s not why I’d been writing daily, not to prepare for inspiration. The idea was to stimulate during the long stretchs when there is no inspiration, and, in one very real and true sense inspiration is a bunch of shit. Truth is you aren’t ever going to be inspired to write something no one has written, there is no great super plot that is going to come to you one day when you are high in cycle. The inspiration is going to be voice, a character, a conflict. Sure you can wait for it, but shit, they are already all out there, riding the subways, walking the streets, alone in the woods over a fire cooking trout. And, more importantly, they’ve been steeping in your mind, the smell of iron and piss or sizzling trout or rain on concrete, frozen like full sensory snapshots in your head.
By you of course I also mean me or perhaps I only mean me on account of I’m not giving advice. I’ve already stalled twice during the writing of this. I have nothing to say and am not very interested in saying it. Makes things like flash Friday even more important. In my mind it’s the reason to spend a hundred grand on an education; discipline. You could read all the text books on your own, you could even sit in on the lectures. Except for the sheepskin that says you put up with all that happy horseshit, what you really got for your money was someone to tell you when to finish a book by and someone to grade your analysis of it. You got the discipline of someone setting a deadline and, if you were lucky, some curious folks talking about whatever subject with enthusiasm. And sure, if you’re taking pre-med you wouldn’t have been allowed to carve up a corpse at home, not without potential hassles from homicide detectives, but you sure could have read about it.
Alright. Have a busy few days and if I’m lucky I’m going somewhere, anywhere, for the weekend.
And I’m spent.
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