Having Something To Say · 9:14am Jan 2nd, 2015
I think one of the most important parts of writing is having something to say.
All my best stories were things I needed to say. They would expand to fill my idle thoughts and dominate my decision making processes. I'd create tabletop characters specifically to reflect certain thoughts or sentiments that were occurring in my writing, I'd meditate on the emotional states for hours, and the story became so real and vivid that I had to discharge it from my system.
The reason why I lost a full year of writing was because I was waiting for that to happen again.
I think that was a mistake. And I think it was because I was sourcing my expectations too high. I wanted to again get in touch with the most vivid, powerful emotional states I could imagine. I wanted to write stories that would change my life and bring me to terms with fundamental problems. But I didn't have anything to say on those topics! I was safe, happy, comfortable and actualised. I was getting everything I wanted out of life and so I just didn't have a message that I needed to communicate in that same way. And it just dragged me around in circles as I tried to channel an energy I didn't possess.
I think my breakout epiphany has been that I have tonnes of things to say - but they're smaller things. Things like 'digging a hole is way harder than you'd expect,' and 'When I finally buy a house it's gonna be cooler than the goddamn batcave'. Smaller things, things closer to home and my heart, a look at that lovely, relaxed and yet unnecessarily dramatic everyday. Once I realised that there was power in that then writing just came alive for me in a way that it hadn't in a very long time.
It comes down to insights, I think. Power in stories comes from some kind of insight or observation about how the real world works. Once you have an insight, any insight, then you've got the beating heart of a story.
Here are some I'm currently holding onto:
Old people love talking to strangers.
There is legitimately nothing more sad than old people with regrets.
Revenge stories are about deeply fucked up relationships. The anger is almost always, "I'm mad that you took away my property" rather than "I miss her".
Birds are weird.
Nothing feels half as good as whacking a mosquito.
One way to tell if people genuinely believe something or if they're repeating it by rote is to ask questions grounded in physical sensation. No one could tell me how God smells.
Clouds are like mountains; enormous battleships of the sky.
You can go into a conversation determined to say one simple thing and wind up saying something totally different due to a weird desire not to make waves.
I'm capable of ending a relationship with a beautiful girl.
Ain't there amazing stories behind every one of those?
- Thanqol
While I was writing this, a bird landed on my window sill, two feet from my head. It screamed four times and then flew away.
Birds are weird.
I have two birds, a parakeet and a budgerigar.
1. They screech (oh how they screech). Well, the parakeet screeches, but the little one does its best to imitate. I listen to all my music with headphones on, and sometimes I just wear the headphones to block out the noise even when I'm not listening to music, because to not wear headphones is to go insane and develop tinnitus.
2. I swear, nothing beats birds in making a mess. They throw their food everywhere, it's a damn miracle that they actually get anything in their stomachs, because it sure doesn't look like they do. At a guess, I'd say probably 95% or more of the food they pick up in their beaks ends up on the floor, wasted. Birds are the most wasteful animals I can think of, probably even beating humans, and that's an accomplishment.
Now, as if wasting and making a mess was some kind of art to be perfected, my parakeet has figured out how to yank out its food bowls and throw the whole bloody thing on the floor, meaning of course that it doesn't get all that lovely food I just gave it. But some birds just want to watch the world drown in bird seeds, I guess.
3. They make all these weird little dances and acrobatic displays. It's like they think "If I crawl up here, jump down here, repeat it five times, then bop my head like this, jump to the left, go back right, jump to the left, repeat three times, press my ear to the branch and make some sounds ... I just bet something's gonna happen."
Birds are weirdly ritualistic. Either that, or they think they're playing some kind of console game with their movements.
Birds are weird. But I swear I love them anyway, even though it defies all reason.
2695508
See? That's insight, that's what I'm talking about here! Stories like that are huge.
One of the things I find the most interesting about ponies is the pegasi (a future blog topic, for sure). Part of that is because they are part bird. I really want to do stuff with that concept and things like your stories about your budgie are key.
The other side is weather. There's a thunderstorm happening right now outside my window (maybe the bird from before was warning me). There are lightning bolts every 20 seconds and a distant rumbling. Because there's totally no wind it's been hovering in the same shape for hours, the same few lightning bolts coming out of the same cloud in this beautiful and almost rhythmic pattern.
Did you know that if you're standing in a thunderstorm wearing wireless headphones then the lightning can cause the music to skip? I don't think many people know that. And weirdly, that little fact more than anything else made me realise how spectacularly powerful they are.
I think asking what God smells like is an unfair question!
2695688 No it's not. She smells like thunderstorms.
2695704
I couldn't really tell you what a thunderstorm smells like :/ Maybe I just have a weak sense of smell? I was thinking water and energy was probably the best description, but I couldn't remember too clearly... I had more on my mind than smell at the time!
This needs to be written, right now.
My rule is:
Don't sit around waiting for the Muse to come and tap you on the head before you start writing. 'Cause she's pretty busy down on the next block right now helping some eight-year-old kid work out his first poem...
Mike
2695707 They smell like anticipation.
2695765 Yes sir!
2695969 Oh yeah, believe me, I know. I just got wrapped up in this sense of, "I want to be the best author, so I will only write the best stories!" Totally absurd! But I didn't even notice it was happening!
2696496
Um, OK. Well, I'll just say I was far too focused on how God FELT than how He (or She, if you prefer) smelled!
2696885 Feels like dewy grass in between your toes. Sounds like a perfectly tuned grand piano. Tastes like warm milk with a shot of Baileys. Smells like a thunderstorm in summer. Looks like a sunset in the rain.
I am profoundly suspicious of any theological discussion that does not accommodate these basic truths.
2697034
Feels like water flowing through your heart. Looks like bright blue energy flowing through and lighting the shadows. Never seen that shade of blue anywhere else... The closer a color gets to it, though, the more beautiful I find it. Wind rushing but profound silence, peace and utter calm, joy and a desire to share it. Feels like the wind is blowing through your body, instead of stopping as it hits you. My most profound experience, anyways ^///^ Hope.
2695514
Skip, as in change the track? I knew lightning could mess with electronics, but assuming you're using a phone or MP3 player I would expect it to just kinda stop briefly or scratch or something. CD players on the other hand will happily skate around between tracks at the slightest disturbance or sign of smudge.
We just had a hell of a storm tonight, or at least it sounded way more ferocious than usual when it woke me up. I was thinking I should get up and look at it, but then I must have fallen asleep again. A shame. There's something peaceful about storms, as odd as it sounds. Like, there's no one out there, it's just an empty world of gray and gloom, no sound but the wind and rain. I find that beautiful.
Is it odd that the idea of an empty world of gray and gloom makes me smile?
2695704
It's unfair to me. I have no (well a very limited) sense of smell
We had a pet mockingbird we rescued as a baby that lived for 17 years. His nest had been up in a steetlamp which he'd fallen out of, one of his feet got pretty mangled and he didn't have full use of one of his wings after a cat put some teeth through it(before we could get him). Dude couldn't have gotten food for himself so he had to stay caged.
After we watched Star Wars on VHS, he could imitate some of R2D2's beeps and boops. My mother also had a distinct set of notes that she would whistle at him, which he learned and would sing right back at her. Sometimes I heard her whistle only the first half and wait, and dude would sing the second to complete it. A strange time for me was during S1 when Fluttershy's character was being fleshed out--those two have more in common than just singing/whistling at birds. We also had three rescued doves and a squirrel, two dogs, some cats, a chicken coop and.... yeah. She sang when she cleaned sometimes also. And there are other things. It got weird in episodes sometimes. The bleedthrough had me feeling like Eddie Valiant or something.
Our mockingbird's favorite composer was Mozart. When we'd play any of the others, he stayed silent. But when we played Mozart, he'd bust out his song repertoire. It's the wildest damn thing hearing and watching a bird jamming to Mozart. We ruled out this occurring because of any timing coincidences over the years--it was the Mozart. We played lots of different music types in order to experiment with this. We found that he did also sing along to some Pink Floyd songs.
If we suspended his cage outside on the patio and other mockingdudes were already outside singing, he would sing, and silence the others. They didn't try to countersing or songmatch him when he started like they often do to each other in the wild. They just stopped and listened to him. We had also played several tapes for him of other bird calls including those not found in North America, so dude had a sick repertoire.
He ate mealworms, which lived and burrowed in small plastic buckets of oats. We fed him these with tweezers. Mealworms try to burrow into everything. Which sometimes included our carpet, because dude would occasionally launch them. I once had a nightmare that one of them was burrowing into the palm of my hand. He would only eat the larvae and pupae, if we tried to feed him the adult beetles he would freak out screaming and refuse.
In an attempt to get laid, mockingbirds will seek higher ground to sing in order to project their voices farther.
He had a distinctly loud chirp we called the "Fuckoff" noise reserved for cats or other mockingdudes that he saw outside. When he was hungry, he produced a much softer "cheep" that rose at the end like he was asking a question. If you approached his cage and spoke quietly to him while maintaining eye contact, he would begin to softly coo. This would continue until you backed away from it.
2708993 That's amazing. A little fragment of a whole life, right there.