I'm not sure what my words sound like to you, but to me they're set to the sounds of Gert Taberner radio on Spotify. This morning, when it was warming up and the world outside was crisp and fresh, I listened to Jewel and baked waffles. Last night, through a chance comment of mine, I went to the movie theater with people I know and love and watched Avengers: Endgame.
I know this sounds random and discombobulated right now. But there is a point.
I finished my last high school classes last week. (That's not the point either.)
I see it beginning to take shape now. Two halves.
The First Half: Am I Not Entertained?
No. Not especially.
Sometime recently, I began to notice changes in how I consume art. Books, movies, music, all of it. It used to be, I read as a reader. I watched as a watcher. I listened as a listener. Now, when I read, when I watch, when I listen, I do it all as a writer.
I hardly know how it happened. Once upon a time, I laughed at the jokes and let them be. Now, even as I laugh, I ask questions. "What does that joke say about this character at this point in the story? What does it set him up to say later?"
I suspect the things that I catch are the same things that have always caught me. But now, I'm conscious, and these things fill my head. I don't let them simmer on the back burner. I hover over the pots, I tinker with the recipes, I add a dash of this, a sprinkle of that, hoping perhaps this batch will be edible, perhaps someday I can make it for more than myself.
That's intention. That's purpose.
So don't think I can't enjoy art anymore. To the contrary, it now has much more potent meaning for me. There's a sharp joy in thinking, "Ah, I understand what she did there! Look how clever that is."
It's much more important than that though. It's not just the tricks, the little turns that help accomplish the purpose.
It's the purpose itself. It's looking at a story and brushing aside the the distractions; technique, style, the words themselves, all that can be done away with. And it's saying, what is the soul of this story? What is its essence? If I can do that, if I can look at the vulnerable heart of the story, I can start adding those things back in, because now they're not distractions; they're the vehicle. They're how the author gets that soul from their head and heart to ours.
I am learning to learn from the examples of others.
The Second Half: Entertaining Myself
I got a smartphone a few months ago, even though I hate the very thought of it. Unfortunately, there's an app I need for work, and my family wants a way to communicate with me, and it's not practical to carry a flip phone and an iPod everywhere I go. So I consolidated.
But while it reduces the amount of stuff I carry on me, it seems to multiply the amount of stuff I put into my head. And when I'm consuming, I'm not producing.
I had been thinking until the other day, "I'm learning to learn from what I consume. Consumption is good because now I can use this stuff." But to my frustration, I wasn't using it. My writing ideas, captured in snippets and seconds, were growing. But I wasn't sitting down and writing. I would think about it, but somehow I would stare at the page, then either pick up a book and read or watch a show.
Inspiration comes and goes. The greatest impediment to writers has never been a lack of inspiration, but a lack of discipline.
I could feel the ideas, ready to be developed if only I would put in the time. "You have to write before you feel ready," I told myself. "There's no way to get better unless you do it. Taste the darn thing, Anna. Just see what it's like."
Still. Still I consumed, and produced nothing but a couple songs in as many months and a few half-baked characters.
Then one day, I turned off the radio when I was driving.
The silence was beautiful.
My scattered, chaotic, unsorted thoughts slowly filtered and began to put themselves in order. Characters that had been hiding in the background until I was ready to meet them again stood up and asked me who they were. I began to answer.
I filled the silence.
I can't believe that I didn't know. I think now, I should have known.
I pride myself on knowing how my mind works. I know how easily I get overstimulated. I know how important writing is to my emotional stability. Yet I had been cluttering my head with processed imagination and letting it stagnate. It was tangled. It was clotted.
What's more, I was already overstimulated from the sheer amount of people that my job requires me to interact with, and adding to that could only end negatively.
The fact is, I believe my writing has decreased in quality. Big picture stuff has improved. I have a better eye for plotting, and I think my character development is on the road to somewhere really nice. I have a better grasp on abstract concepts than I ever have before, and I'm recognizing the importance of making people not only do conflicting things, but having themselves conflicting personalities. The problem is the words themselves. There's a lack of taste and grace that I see in every prose piece I write. I wrestle the words into shapes that I hope, rather than believe, represent the soul of the story, and those words fight me all the way.
It was not always this hard. It's like going out to lunch with an old friend and realizing, no, you're not friends anymore. And why? What's causing this disconnect?
There are two reasons. First, I don't read on the same level that I used to. For years, I read books every day that challenged and grew my vocabulary, and left me more competent with the English language in general. There's a big difference between juvenile and young adult fiction. Juvenile, for the most part, tends to build up ideas and reinforce healthy concepts that children have heard before. The lines are clearly drawn, and the good guy wins. YA is a whole different ballgame. It seeks to challenge. It wants readers to look at their long-held ideals and examine them anew. To call a YA book "unsettling" is a compliment, not a complaint. And in order to do this, YA authors like to strip it down to the basics. It's not someone else talking down to the reader, it's almost a mirror of the reader, talking to himself. It defeats the purpose for new words to be introduced; that's distracting when all that matters is the battle of concepts. I believe if I read less YA and more classics, I would be a more competent writer.
The second reason is that I don't write enough. The only things I've ever really learned, I learned by doing. It takes me years to become good friends with a person, and those years are not easy ones. But the more I interact with them, the more I test their limits and their proclivities, the faster I learn who they are and how our friendship can be most rewarding. I must write if I want to know how to write.
I strongly suspect that this is not an easy blog post to read. I think it's vague, and not tied together all too well, and the sentence structure is probably repetitive. But that's the point. I have to start somewhere.
The Conclusion: Horizon
Things have cleared up a little. There's still far too much in my head and far too little on the page. But I have some idea of where to go.
Keeping the radio off can only do so much. I need to have a better hold grasp on how much art consumption is too much, and then I need to put my phone in its drawer and start grinding out these words. I'm toying with the idea of a completely entertainment-free week. Because that's really the key takeaway from this post: when there's a gap in my entertainment, I can and will supply it for myself.
If I can be honest, I'm really not liking this post, but I spent over two hours writing it and it's almost midnight and I have work tomorrow.
In everything I write, I try to distill it to the soul of the story and the characters. Well, this is me, scattered and stumbling, but still going forward. Take it for what you will.
Goodnight and so long,
Anna
