Writer's Stuck

2024-04-15

I have been trying to write for an hour every day. My goal was to write more fiction but right now I’m in a bit of slump. Instead, I’ve been writing a lot of blog posts, which, to me, still counts as writing. It’s still not the kind of writing I wish I could be doing, though.

It makes me wonder what’s behind my current writer’s block. Maybe my life has been too stagnant recently. Or maybe I’ve been looking for inspiration in all the wrong places.

By inspiration, I mean that I’m definitely someone who needs to respond to something. I’m not the type of person who can just randomly pull ideas out of their head. My best ideas are the ones that build upon an existing idea, either by exploring an idea further or adding a twist (or several!) to it. Usually I get my best inspiration from fiction. But I haven’t come across anything really that has sparked an interest in me.

Last month I finished "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf and it did, for a little bit, light a fire in me but it was quickly extinguished. The idea I wanted to explore felt a little too close to home for me to write about. In other words, it felt a little icky to explore it. Even after several layers of abstraction, I still felt too vulnerable. I think I do eventually want to write about the topic I had in mind but I think I need to sit with it a little bit more. I think it feels too vulnerable because I haven’t processed it yet. So, there is something that I want to write about but it’s not the right time for it.

Otherwise, I don’t have anything to say, really. Funny, just as I wrote that, something came to mind. But, like my previous idea that “To the Lighthouse” sparked, it feels too early to write about this other topic. I feel like I haven’t come to a conclusion on it. But maybe I don’t need an answer to able to write about. Remember, I’m talking about fiction here, not a way too personal blog post. I think it’s okay to have unanswered questions in fiction, right?

But when I think about the fiction that I like to read, they feel very opinionated, even when it feels like there is ambiguity. For example, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” she pits two different economic systems against each other. It’s not super clear whether or not Le Guin prefers one over the other but she still makes great arguments for both of them. Still, by the end of the book, there is still a message: you got to try it before you knock it.

There are a lot of things that I could be trying. Maybe the way I’m working at it is the wrong way to approach writing (at least, when I’m stuck). My usual approach is to start with a core message and then craft the story around it. When I observe what other writers say, many start with the characters or the world instead. I’m not a world-builder as most of what I write is rooted firmly on realism so that throws that out of the window. That being said, I feel like I’ve always written in the same way for so long that maybe I need to switch it up.

Like, it’s been a long time since I’ve centred my building of a story around a character. To say that my stories aren’t character driven or character centred would be inaccurate. Honestly, I’m in awe of people who know their characters inside out. When I write characters, they kinda just appear to me and I don’t feel like I need to know everything about them. They’re there for a specific purpose and what I portray on the page is enough to get across the intricacies of their personality (or at least, what I feel is important to get across). Now that makes me wonder how people view my characters and if they can tell that I don’t fully flesh out my characters, hah.

Another approach that I often see as an antidote for writer’s block are writing prompts. Sometimes those work, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I’m writing for a writing prompt and I still get stuck.

I also see free-writing as an often touted approach to unblocking oneself. But what I’m doing right now is a free-write and I don’t feel any closer to jumping across the chasm to writing something in the fictional realm. It results in a lot of blog posts, at the very least.

Usually I just accept that I have nothing to write. It results in months and even years of not writing anything. Maybe I’m just not meant to write? Another possibility. But I’m going to try to experiment a little bit before I give it up.

Alone or Lonely

2024-04-14

When I think about my life five years from now and how I want it to look like, I think my vision is is the same as it was five years ago.

Five years ago I thought I’d be looking out over downtown in a high-rise apartment, surrounded by concrete buildings. Now I am willing to settle, even longing for, a little more greenery in my view. As I look over whatever the scenery is outside, I picture myself sitting at a small table, with a book or a laptop, either reading or writing. My cat is slung over the top of his cat tower, sleeping. I’ll be playing one of my vinyl records, maybe some Sharon Van Etten or Snail Mail. Because I live in a walkable neighbourhood, I can go down to a cafe and read and write some more, but with a cup of tea. Or I’ll go to a restaurant and eat something fancy. There’ll be a gym nearby and I can do some weight lifting. I can take a walk around a park while listening to an audiobook or a podcast.

The one thing I realize in all my visions of the future is that I am alone (save for my cat).

I am a very solitary person. Despite this, I admit that I am definitely someone who enjoys the company of others. So why don’t I make room for people in my idealized future life?

Maybe it’s because I can get too caught up in my own world. It makes maintaining friendships hard. I am the type of person who can surface after days, weeks, months, years after contact and keep going along with a friend like nothing has changed. The problem is that not everyone is like that. In my first year of university, many of my high school friends dropped me because I was suddenly unattainable. I had so many things going on that my friends kind of fell off of my mind. It made sense why they dropped me but it still stung.

I think this is why I can make “work friends” so easily. You see them every day without too much effort to do so. The proximity helps a lot. It does feel like work friends just become friends of convenience but it’s enough to feed my longing for connection. Or so I think. I’m not entirely sure.

The only time I feel lonely is when I compare myself to others. I don’t even know if it’s loneliness that I feel. The feeling is more like envy. I am envious when others talk about hanging out with their friends. Obviously I don’t feel envious enough to change my ways. I feel sorry for myself for a little bit and then go back to being my hermit self.

As I write this, I’m asking myself how much of this is just me trying to cope with the fact that I am often alone. Do I enjoy my time alone? Yes, I think so. But how would I really know?

Going back to the times when I was most social, I realize that I would often overdo it. I would spend too much with others and all the things that I liked doing by myself would fall to the wayside. It’s like I can’t keep a healthy balance of me time vs other people time. It could be that spending too much time on one end of the spectrum causes me to go to the opposite end in order to recuperate.

What would balance look like for me? Right now, I’m not content with just having work friends. But starting from scratch is so incredibly hard. One of my goals this year was to make a new friend. Or rekindle an existing friendship. One third of the way through the year and I’ve made no progress towards either (and just a clarification to any online friends reading this, I am talking about making friends in the “meat space”). Where do I start? How could I possibly start?

My last friend group was formed around my ex. And I met my ex through another friend group, a bunch of people from the computer science club at university. My inclination is to join another club-like group. I have often toyed the idea of joining a Meetup Group. Maybe a book club (as if I don’t have too many books to read already) or a writing group. Or maybe something extremely out of my comfort zone and totally left field, like an improvisation club (yikes).

I’m still thinking about it. All of this came about because I just finished reading the poem, “How to be Alone” by Tanya Davis. As I read through it, I couldn’t help but read it with some disdain. A lot of what the book talked about that were supposed to come off as a little revolutionary was just how I live currently. Okay, except for talking to random strangers on park benches, I don’t do that.

But another thing that spurred this on was a post tangentially about being terminally online. I can’t deny that a lot of my “alone time” is spent online. The author mentions taking a social media detox. I don’t know if that would help me at all. I think I would instead just dive myself deep into my studies or reading or writing. I think it would help me be more productive in those areas, actually. But productivity is not the goal I want. Connection, is. I think.

I’m not sure. I’m still turning these ideas around in my head, even after writing 900+ words about this. I wonder if anyone feels the same.

Xenophon is Just Like Me

2024-04-05

Right now I’m reading The Socratic Method by Ward Farnsworth. In it, Farnsworth brings up Bertrand Russell, a philosopher who criticizes Xenophon’s writings on Socrates for not accurately portraying Socrates. The full quote goes like this:

“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”

When I read this line, I felt an adverse reaction. It felt like this quote was talking about me.

I don’t claim to be an intellectual. Heck, I don’t claim to be smart, either. After all, here I am, taking Russell’s quote completely out of context to feed my own ego.

But this quote is why I often feel like I do disservice to literature by reading it. I feel like the point of a lot of literature never lands with me. I don’t notice clever things. I miss allusions to other works. I take a complex piece of literature and boil it down to a simple theme that may or may not have been a red herring. And every time I write about my thoughts or interpretations of a novel, I often feel like “a stupid man reporting.” What I may think is profound and well thought out, may not actually be. Maybe what I extract out of a book is too obvious. Or way off the mark. It’s embarrassing to think about.

But I keep reading literature. Because I still feel like I’m getting something out of it. I mostly use books as an introspective tool and even if I don’t “get” a book, I’m able to learn at least a little bit about myself. After reacting to certain characters or situations in a book, I can re-evaluate my values and tweak them a bit. I can uncover something about myself what was subconscious but suddenly put into words. I can add something from a book to my list of hopes and dreams.

It feels like a selfish way of reading. But that’s just the way I like to read. Of course, sometimes I like to just be plain entertained by what I read. But I want to be more than entertained. I want to learn and, afterwards, to summarize it all in “a stupid man’s report” (the stupid man is me and the report is also me).