My Writing Output

Limping Along

“It may shock you to hear this, but just sitting down and writing can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a topic already in mind, especially-especially if you are not required to do it for grades or pay…”

I wrote that 2 years ago and since that time I have had significant changes to my life and my writing has completely changed in output and type since then.  I got a career in September 2017 working for my hometown’s city hall and that dominates my time.

While I do not consider my job especially difficult, once you get passed learning how to navigate the bureaucracy it is only a needlessly complicated series of checklists and meetings that could be emails.  However, the job is so time consuming and so lacks creative elements that I find myself unable to write for my own benefit.  Sure, there are exceptions and I have pressed myself to write at least one entry on this blog each month, but it is a side effect of such gainful employment that I do not have the creative spark while working there.

What I do have is a small but regular trickle of work that allows me to write in a professional environment.  It does not stretch my abilities, it is not mentally rewarding, but it is required and has consequences.  I have check what I am writing to make sure I am not breaking the law; while at the same time having no metric to follow; and having to interpret what I am told so as to tell it to other people.

Playing “telephone” via email is its own sort of writing exercise.

Not this Year

            Last year I didn’t bother to give an update on my goal of writing 1,000,000 words, nor did I give an update on my goal of writing a blog for everyday of the calendar year.  I have certainly tried to advance each and have made progress.  I only have 16 days of the year without an entry, and I have crossed the 750,000-word goal.

 

October and November, why are they my weakest months for output?

My writing has never been stronger (at least according to standardized testing, something everyone should question the validity of) as last October I retook the GRE and scored a 5, putting me in the 92 percentile on the writing portion of the exam.  I took the test in order to apply to Doctorate programs and am pleased with the results. (I will be writing more about my decision to do that and the results in the days/weeks to come.)  And let’s be clear, I don’t ever want to take the GRE again.  Two is two too many.

I have had plenty of ideas for what to write, and have a folder of “Draft Zeroes” with ideas for short stories or novels and have written out an outline for a book that is only a couple thousand words but represents something I haven’t done before, a plotted out story with a beginning, middle, and end.  There is even a rough set of chapter breaks along the way for all the shenanigans that I might want to slide in.

New ticks and quirks have emerged, with my tendency to use, “So, …” to start off paragraphs and sentences.  A reliance on evidence, citations, and stating my suppositions causing me to preface everything and then explain my point.  Trying to mix this up with the occasional, “It follows then…” or a “Taking that as a starting point…” could make my writing stronger, but that also makes it more verbose.  SO, I am unsure as to how to tackle that habit.

There are other issues I have that I have never been able to overcome.  My inability to name things is perhaps my biggest weakness when playing Dungeons and Dragons (which yes, I do credit as part of my writing.  While DnD is a game, there is tons of creative work that goes into it and issues from it, just look at the multitude of novels that surround the property).  Names are not my forte and the fact that I made two different recurring characters’ names, “Kevin” shows this sort of wekness.

I like plot and I like setting and I like dialogue, but ask me who is saying things, the name of where they are saying them, or what they call the events they are talking about… and I just don’t know what to say.  Often falling back on the blandest of proper nouns or portentous uninformative claptrap (like “Destiny” a game I dislike specifically because it does something I see as my biggest weakness).

Maybe you all see some other aspects of my writing that need improvement, be it a matter of style, content, or just that I have a number of typos in everything.  I have no editor.  I do my best… or as I mentioned at the start, I do what I can.

The Future

            My writing will continue to mutate.  I hardly ever do movie reviews anymore, not because I stopped watching and having opinions on movies, but because I did movie reviews originally in order to further an aspect of my writing.  And I see my abilities in movie reviewing as sort of complete.  Movies were something I could trust a certain number of people have seen and have tastes in, they have a language that can be understood, deconstructed, and evaluated based on a criteria of both personal taste and technical acumen.

            Essentially, movies are something I could pull apart in multiple ways and in doing so practice my ability to pull ideas apart.  I could teach myself to recognize foreshadowing, metaphor, and visual presentations of information.  I can look at a movie like “Hereditary” and see how the movie planted ideas in the mind of the audience and how well those ideas were capitalized later in the narrative.

            Being able to catch those turns and flourishes is something I think I have down well enough that I am just no longer all that interested in picking them out.  Sure, from time to time, and if I had the time and creative spark, I am sure I would have just written movie reviews for the sake of a creative outlet, but in my current state of not having the time or drive they just do not have that pull on me.

            Honestly, what I want to pull apart more than anything is the old opinions I have on this blog.  My personal world view has changed so much in the last 10 years that I feel the need to write the rebuttal to my younger self.  I feel like I did not become an adult till I was 27 and even then, I was not informed enough to hold a real substantive opinion.

Now that I have degrees, work experience, and have just had to stand by while the world around me became various flavors of strange or hostile, I am a changed man and having the young me’s writing out there informing other people’s opinions of who I am now… it is misleading to them.

SO, it is likely that this blog will have a few dozen entries where I look back on who I was and how I thought at the time and just take myself to task.  Hopefully, I am not just so how much better I am now, but the act of doing this makes me better still.  Maybe I can even show other people why I felt the way I did at the time, why I changed, and why the change is for the better.  Help them change for the better too.

For Those Reading This

            I cannot emphasize enough how important writing is to who I am.  How important it is to my growth as a person.  I cannot recommend it enough to everyone out there.

            Find something you care about and write about it.  Don’t just write for yourself either.  You have to put it out there.  Even if no one reads it.  Even if those who do call you a talentless asshole.  All of that is part of it.

            Writing something that no one but you will read is masturbatory and does not help you grow, and it does not temper your skills.  You have to have some standard that exists outside yourself that you are trying to meet and surpass, even if it is the imagined judgment of potential readers.

            Write.

            Please.

            Trust me, it is worth it.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

1,000,000 Words, Year 4

Course correction from previous year

            April 26^th is the anniversary of when I first started keeping track of how much I write and really aiming to say more with my writing.  I embraced the adage, “The first 1,000,000 words are practice and began keeping a journal as to how many words I wrote each day (quickly shifting to just logging the number of words and writing down the date).

            I logged college papers, memos, journals, emails, and more often than not these blogs.  Because so much of my writing was tied up with school and the nature of the assignments I was participating in was shifting and dropping off toward the end of things I also noticed a drop off in the amount I was writing.

            It may shock you to hear this, but just sitting down and writing can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a topic already in mind, especially-especially if you are not required to do it for grades or pay.  Writing as a means of self-improvement is like the mental equivalent of working out, except it doesn’t make you look more enticing to people which is a motivator all its own.

            Writing can be tiring and daunting and when you have been keeping a steady measure of your writing like I have you start to understand the size of the goal I have set.  This is the 4^th year of this project and I am still just short of 500,000 words.  But this last year was an improvement.

            2016 had the most blog entries of any year I have been on Blogger.  It was a rather productive year of writing.  Not counting this entry, I have written 162,749 words in the last 12 months.  That I have logged anyway, there is some old trash that I wrote down as half thoughts and never hammered into anything workable.  That is 445.9 words a day.  The year prior only averaged 128.1.  I managed 3.5 times as much.  Good for me.

A Change in Perspective

            It is kind of silly to talk about this so short after talking about the 6th year anniversary of the blog as a whole just two months ago.  Which I coincided with the 400^th entry overall.  This is the 419^th entry… That is not a milestone.  It is not even a mildly funny number like 420.

            I have made some changes since then.  For instance, I have started using Google analytics.  Boy, is it a confidence boost.  According to them more people have been to the moon than have stayed on my page long enough to read an entire entry.  I could be putting anything on here and no one would read it.  Maybe the fat that I do put so much disparate stuff on here is why no one is reading it?  Whatever.

            I should have put analytics on this blog years ago and I have no idea why I chose now of all times to do so.  It makes more sense when I look back on my management of this blog.  I added the "Please like and share..." to the end of things in February 2015.  I didn't start using "+1" and Twitter until May 2014.

            I guess it is a good thing that I am not in charge of online communication for any political campaigns, my guy's online presence would be thin on the digital ground, in spite of it all being well written.  Maybe I should have written all of this into my 400th entry. Once again, my writing about something causes me to become introspective enough to find out what the topic of the thing should have been.

Projects for Scope and Benchmarks

            I have been writing about Dungeons and Dragons near weekly.  I have been doing more 30-day blog challenges (and plan to do another one in October).  And I have been trying to write a blog entry for everyday on the calendar, which has been going well, I will update on that project’s progress on the anniversary of starting it, November 22^nd.

Some Old Tripe

            Sometimes I start writing about a particular movie or show and it just doesn’t grab me as a topic.  I figured, for a change, I would just throw some of these half-thoughts onto this thing to give an example of what my typical starting points look like.  So here are things for “The Purge”, “50 Shades of Grey”, and “Hail, Caesar!”.

            My thoughts on “Freddy vs Jason” were destined for here, but I somehow made them just enough more to be their own thing.

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“The Purge” Franchise

            The movies are all about how "It's my right!" to commit violence and to destroy each other is an idea sold by the rich to the poor so that once a year the poor slaughter each other.  So, in real life when you hear someone say, "It's my right to smoke/drink/own-guns/be-a-dickhead" you can realize that it is all a part of having poor people take pride in being poor.

            You can take the movie in a completely literal and skin deep reading, which provides ZERO insight.  Or, you can float the idea that the movie is pointing to how small legal transgressions that people claim as "rights" are propagating a system in which the poor are killing each other and the rich prey on the poor.

            If you ever find yourself justifying what you are doing by saying, "I can" instead of "I should" or "I must" then you are most likely doing something bad or at the very least unproductive, even if it is only destructive to you, it is still a bad thing. All of those movies are about people justifying their bad behavior with "it's my right".

            HAPPY CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY! Remember it's about "states' rights" and "heritage".

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“50 Shades of Grey”

            I saw this movie on an invitation from a woman I would have liked to sleep with.  That is why this writing exists.  I actually saw this in the theater I might as well talk about it, even though the woman who I went with got bored and played on her phone the entire time, fun evening that went nowhere.

            It is clear that everyone working on this movie knew that it would be on their resume whether they wanted it to be or not, so they tried their damnedest to get this shit together.  They did not entirely fail.

            Unfortunately, only Rumpelstiltskin has displayed an ability to spin straw into gold, and since King Midas is dead this movie had to do without their assistance.  Danny Elfman, mysterious creature from the universe where music comes as naturally as speech can only do so much.

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“Hail, Caesar!”

            So here is a quick review of a movie I disliked by writers/directors I respect, the Cohens, and a bunch of actors I like, in a setting I find interesting, and with a plot that should be great.  The thing was a boring slog.

            “Hail, Ceasar” is nominally a comedy but I only laughed in one scene that in retrospect wasn’t all that great.  The whole thing feels like several episodes of a hypothetical TV show (like “Mad Men”) that were pushed together to make one movie that would appeal to a particular type of person.  That type of person can be summed up with the phrase, “works in Hollywood”.

            I think that "Hail, Ceasar" might be the first Cohen Bros movie that would have been better if it were directed by someone else.  Shane Black would have made it funnier, David Lynch would have made it stranger, and Nolan would have made it more mysterious.  As is, the thing falls into a strangely dull middle ground.  It is boring.

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The Beg for Attention

            If you do read my blogs, thank you.  I hope you continue to do so and hopefully I sometimes write something good enough for you to share with others.

            I would also encourage others to do similar self-improvement projects akin my writing.  Try new recipes.  Walk to new places.  Go to the gym.  Read more.  Practice playing an instrument.  Try to be better at the things that you want to be better at.

            Even if you can’t make money doing it.  Try to be a better you because it will make you happy.  I’m happier than I was.  Maybe that feeling will hang around.

            Have fun.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.