creation

it's Sunday and I'm having a very unproductive day....looking through Twitter....watching/ listening to youtube videos...as I write this I'm listening to an interview of David Foster Wallace by Charlie Rose (in 1997)....and writing this. 

Writing is not easy. Writing this blog is not easy, and I would love to (and want to, one day) write a book, and that's even harder, or maybe it's not...I don't know, but I admire people who write books...in general, I mean - I admire the achievement. 

I'm listening to another David Foster Wallace interview now, by David Kipen in 2004. This one is getting more into the technique(s) of writing, which is interesting. but I could listen to him talk about anything. 

Wallace is talking about how he finds writing fiction so much easier than non-fiction. I've often wished I could write fiction. I enjoy literature, but I can't seem to produce it. At uni, part of our first year English course was creative writing, and I did very well at it. The mark I got for my creative writing project was actually the highest mark I have ever received for anything (to the best of my memory, and I think I would remember). But that's because what we were taught was that creative writing wasn't about starting with a good idea and then executing it, it was about playing with language, and we were taught some ways of doing that, which I really enjoyed. And I noticed that this way of doing creative writing was somehow like painting, which I also did and also wasn't very good at in a traditional sense....the idea of playing and trying stuff - being experimental and exploratory. So, for my final project I came up with an idea for combining visual creativity and language creativity in an interesting way. I didn't know what I was producing but I had an idea about how I was going to do it that I was very excited about. It was actually incomplete when I submitted it, but it wasn't really the kind of work with regard to which completion means anything. In anoher sense it went beyond completion....like, you could take out parts of it and they were complete in their own right...a kind of poetry. 

So, going into second year, I had this idea that I was good at creative writing, so I enrolled in a whole course about creative writing. But it didn't go well. I actually failed because I just didn't end up doing the work. The problem was that, for whatever reason, everyone doing this course was now actually trying to do 'proper' creative writing - writing actual stories, and just using the techniques as a way of producing 'real' creative writing. I tried, and that was probably the problem. I feel the need to produce a certain kind of product and I really can't. First of all, when I try to create 'proper' creative writing - when I try to write a story - I write very slowly, but then, that would be OK if what I wrote was at all good, but it's just so....I think the best current word to use for it is 'cringy'. 

I don't know how to make up stuff that simulates reality. I'm not very creative in that sense. I tend to think and write what seems to me to be true. 

I keep coming back to the idea though, of writing something like a novel, or maybe it will just be an extended piece of writing. I do like the idea of making things up. I like doing that when I'm blogging. I haven't done it so much, if at all, in this blog but I did it a few times in my old blog - caeusura - which I have now closed and deleted. I would make up characters and circumstances, but I only do it when I want to, because it's kind of fun. I couldn't expand those elements into a short story, never mind a novel.  I can't sustain all the elements of a fiction...I have to keep grounding what I'm writing in reality. I like having the freedom, which I'm experiencing in this very moment, to do whatever I want from this point on. I have no idea what my next paragraph is going to be like, just as, before I wrote this paragraph, I didn't know what it was going to be about. 

But I've heard novelists talk about their work like that. They begin with an interesting premise and see what happens. They don't know how their work is going to develop, and what makes their work really zesty and compelling is their sense of suspense and drama and anticipation.