This will be both my first year out of full-time education and my first year as a writer.
One thing you come to notice in this job is that things move very slowly. While good news is always very exciting when it comes, it tends to come in large infodumps with gulfs of time between them. It's as if new developments are spaced out so that you don't get overwhelmed and implode out of sheer excitement. This is great for managing expectations and building a sense of stamina as a writer. Good things come to those who wait: that sort of thing. But it's also torture, because nothing gets me more motivated than the knowledge that yes, I really do get to do this for a living now. My brain is moving. And when my brain moves, my mouth moves. The thoughts come and they don't stop.
My reputation as a 'rambler' (less in the sense of 'a person who enjoys taking leisurely walks in nature' and moreso of 'a person with verbal diarrhoea') is well-established by this point in my twenty-one years of life. I'd like to imagine that my frequent and long-winded spiels on subjects as diverse as the inexorable disaster of generative AI, the class dynamics of Korean cinema, and how irrationally annoyed I get when people mispell 'lose' as 'loose' are as interesting to my loved ones as they are to me. I am, of course, very wrong about this. Which isn't to say that I'm a boring person (at least I hope I'm not, though I'm open to the idea) but rather a person who often struggles to discern the relevance of my interests to the busy lives and thoughts of the people around me. It's got worse since I left university. How do I occupy my time now? Write, of course. Write and talk.
I promised my girlfriend earlier this year that I'd start a film blog, because I have so many thoughts about movies that it would be a shame, she said, not to write them down somewhere. Part of me suspects that she was tactfully suggesting I use the blog as a kind of pressure valve: somewhere to unload those thoughts somewhere that isn't 'directly at her at all hours of the day.' I thought that was a good idea. After all, my favourite writers write widely, not just fiction. A blog could be a place for me to collect the ideas in my head and put them somewhere - to have something to show for the sheer amount of ranting I do. But instead of foisting my thoughts upon anyone unlucky to be in my proximity, I could put them online so that anyone who's interested could have a read.
So, as part of my multifaceted New Year's resolution (which also includes exercising more, sleeping better, drinking less Pepsi, deleting Twitter and smashing my mobile phone into a million pieces), I've decided to start the blog. Thanks for being here to read it. Much appreciated.
I'll admit that this is not my first time trying something like this. Before I was published, before I had an agent, I was in my second year of uni and I became convinced that I needed to write more than just novels. So I had the idea of writing essays - just one or two every so often. It wasn't that I necessarily wanted to show them off, but I found that writing imposed a kind of structure on tangled thoughts, which I discovered was actually quite useful for me. Many people have said 'you write to learn what you really think about things.' I can't attribute that quote, but I've definitely heard it before. Anyway, I agree with the sentiment, so I thought I'd take a stab at writing non-academic non-fiction essays.
In the end, I wrote a grand total of three. This, I'll admit, does not bode well for the blogging. But I gave those old essays another read today and I found myself resonating with what I wrote two years ago. In particular, the first essay is (ironically) a little ramble about promising myself to keep up the habit of writing in the face of procrastination. Possibly because it's New Year's Day, when the past looms just as prominently as the future, and the drive to fulfil a resolution is matched only by the dread of falling short of one, this one struck a bit too close to the bone for me today. But I'd like to make up for my previous failure by posting that short essay here. It's a warning that, no matter your initial determination, resolutions can easily fall apart when you get distracted, But, to be a little gentler to myself, I also feel that, by posting the essay here, I'm sort of rehabilitating it. Maybe it's also a promise that you can always pick up a dropped ball.
I will warn you that my writing voice had (and still has!) a habit of falling into a bit of a pompous register. This is almost always an attempt at humour or whimsy that ends up feeling slightly overdone. Teenagers can be cringe. Twenty-one-year-olds can still be cringe. I can't really apologise for it, because I want to be kind to myself and accept that I'm still learning, that continuing to write will soften the edges of my voice over time. Moreover, I believe that ritual humiliation is the most effective form of atonement. So here it is, unadulterated.
Two years on, I'm getting published, but I still don't know what I'm doing. Which I'm sure would cheer nineteen-year-old me up a ton.
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31 March 2023
Why Am I Doing This?
I don’t know what to write.
That’s the truth, and it’s a lie. I know exactly what I should be writing. I should be writing the synopsis for my latest novel, because – though my actions (or lack thereof) might indicate otherwise – manuscripts don’t squeeze into inboxes and submit themselves. Sometimes I wish they would. It would certainly boost my morale.
But I’m not doing that. I’m writing this, instead.
Why? That’s a good question. After all, I don’t know what to write. I have made the decision to sit down on my bed at midnight and write something, without knowing exactly what that something is.
What I do know is that writing a synopsis is a pain. I find no joy in summarizing my own work, for the same reason I’ve always had trouble with writing to word counts. It’s the stricture of it. One idea sparks a dozen, but I haven’t the space to write them down. When you write a synopsis, you have to ignore the trimmings and get to the meat. That means ignoring threads from the story that you feel are highly relevant.
‘But what about the cat? He shows up later!’
It doesn’t matter. Cut it out.
That’s why – no matter how desperately I want to be published – I’m actively delaying writing the synopsis. It’s like running a race only to find a long stretch of knee-deep mud at the end of the track. The finish line is in sight, but you’d better be prepared to wade like hell if you want to reach it.
Wading is boring. Moreover, wading is hard.
I am a master of procrastinating. I do it every day. When it comes to deadlines, I feel like I only need to jump when I get to the edge. Today, I have shamefully chosen to procrastinate in the face of my one, real dream: to make a living as a storyteller. Unlike academic deadlines or work deadlines, my ‘jump-at-the-edge’ attitude is uniquely treacherous when it comes to getting published, where the only deadline is the point at which my shame becomes too great.
Today, I felt that shame brewing. When I woke up this morning, I set myself two tasks. The first was to write an essay due for tomorrow, which I hadn’t started. (Now you see what I mean about deadlines.) The second was to finish my synopsis and submit my novel, The House on Gloam Island, to its first prospective agent. Not too difficult, I thought.
I got out of bed at noon. I decided to watch a series of celebrity interviews on YouTube and then A Fistful of Dollars on a dodgy streaming website before I wrote the allotted 1,000 words about translations of Baudelaire poetry. By the time I’d finished, it was midnight. No time for a synopsis – no time to muster the required emotional labour, at least. I felt like I would cry blood if I read the words ‘elevator pitch’ again.
But I felt that shame. I wanted to write something, anything. I wondered, ‘what if there’s a way to procrastinate creatively?’
I had the idea earlier today (or, more accurately, yesterday. It’s midnight). One of the YouTube interviews was with a talented screen actor who, when her insomnia kicks in, chooses to write essays instead. She takes thoughts from her head and sees where they go. I liked that idea. I am a fundamentally hazy-brained human being. Whenever I impose structure on myself and my writing, it is as a comfort mechanism, to reassure myself of a safe and predetermined way ahead, because I find the thought of fumbling in the dark less thrilling than pants-soilingly frightening. In practice, however, I find that I don’t glue so easily to frameworks. My mind rebels. The best things I’ve ever written were devised on the spur of the moment.
Later in the day, during my hasty research for my essay, I was reading the wealth of essays on translation by the likes of Octavio Paz and Vladimir Nabokov, and I experienced a not-unfamiliar awareness of my own inadequacy. The great novelists and poets and dramatists and polemicists all have vast bodies of work to constitute their legacies. Their voice endures, not only in the fiction they published, but the reams upon reams of their ‘Other Writings’. It’s an oft-overlooked heading, and one, I realised, I have nothing to file under. I who claim to be an author have no body of work outside of my limited juvenilia. No observations to be made. No musings to share. If I died tomorrow, my life’s work would be confined to the four, largely plagiarised novels I’ve written since I was eleven, and some pompous film reviews on Letterboxd.com. This, I thought, could not stand.
So, as I stared at my computer screen, lit by the feeble glow of my desk lamp, I decided. I’m going to write something. I’m going to start a diary. A diary of essays. Because, of course, that would take much less time and effort than simply typing a five-hundred-word synopsis.
My reasons are manifold. It is nothing new for a teenager to brush up against existential dread. It’s what we’re known for. On the other hand, it seems almost tasteless for someone of my age to obsess over legacy. Of course I don’t have a body of work. I’m nineteen years old. I am lucky enough to have written one book, let alone four. As a writer, I am still in a nascent stage. I have achieved, but I also understand that I don’t know everything yet. My ambition is hamstrung by my inexperience. But I hope, through the cultivation of this little project, that I can make a tangible difference to my work. By writing it all down, I hope to find my voice. Maybe I can develop it into something that people would want to read, or listen to. Either way, at least I’ll have leapfrogged that fatal combination of arrogance and laziness and done something useful with my time. I have written, and I am writing. That will be enough to tide me over.
Of course, I’m going to set realistic expectations. This will not be a daily diary. I will not be able to write a thousand words every day – I am, as I’ve already mentioned, a procrastinator.
As for the quality of these entries, I am no Woolf, nor Orwell, nor Brecht. My thoughts do not order themselves into eloquent paragraphs, nor follow any perfect logical crescendos as theirs seemed to. I can promise neither the fluency nor the profundity that characterises their writing. My curse is that I often write the way I talk: not in a way that feels natural and colloquial and down-to-earth, but in a way that is long-winded and rambling and full of errors. I’m going to pretend that it’s part of my charm.
Lastly, I’m not convinced that I’ll always have something worthy of writing down. Things that I find hugely interesting now may become very mundane within days of writing them down. Even on those rare occasions where I believe I have something unequivocally brilliant to say, I often find it gets lost somewhere between my brain and the keyboard. When it comes out, it takes a while to wind up at the point. With that in mind, I make it my solemn vow not to title any of my essays before I write them. The likelihood is that wherever I start will be wildly different to wherever I end up.
So, there it is. My first non-academic essay.
I could have written a synopsis in this time.
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