Warning: Possibly the Boringest Blog EVER!

I didn’t think I’d get to this point so quickly, but here I am, writing about the most boring subject people who write ever write about:  Writing.

I’ve only got about eight items posted so far.  It’s funny (no, REALLY!  It IS!!), but when I’m just tooling around on Facebook or whatever, I have about a zillion stories.  Everything anybody says to me prompts me to come back with, “Hey, that reminds me of the time. . .”.  However, when I give myself the assignment to “write about something”, I draw more blanks than brilliances.  So, that being the case, I’ve decided to post as an update on Facebook a call for subject matter.  Because I’ll write about anything, man — I’m not proud.

The rest of this is just for other writery types, so feel free to ignore it if you don’t find the act of writing all that fascinating. 

Many years ago, for a British Novel class with Mr. Dr. Cheney, we were assigned Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  Nerd that I am, I instantly fell in love with the book.  Partly because of the story, but that was really only a very small part of the attraction.  Mostly, I fell in love with Fowles’s writing.  He really hooked me, in this particular book, when he committed what is often considered to be one of the worst sins an author can — he intruded, for one whole chapter, as himself, to explain what happened while he was writing a particular scene.  He said that he had meant for the two characters in question to do something entirely different from what he eventually ended up writing.  But, as he said, the characters themselves had different plans.  People who don’t write fiction don’t understand this, the idea that the author may not have complete control over his characters, but the most prevalent emotion I felt upon reading that this sort of thing happened to John Fowles as well was relief. 

I thought the fact that a short story I was once writing completely fizzled because I couldn’t make the two main characters shut the hell up meant that I was a bad writer.  I figured out later that the reason they wouldn’t shut up was because they were both semi-autobiographical characters, so I was essentially writing a conversation between two parts of my own personality.  I’m a gabby guy, so of course they weren’t about to shut up. 

I never went back to this story because I really think I’d have to reinvent most of the characters to get the job done.  I still have the story fully formed in my head — I wrote a very short version of it when I was fifteen years old — but the longer version may never live to see the light of day.  Probably just as well, considering how unabashedly derivative it was.  Anyone who read the story would instantly recognize what a huge fan I am of Stephen King.  It was the second idea for a novel that I never delivered on, though — the first was an almost COMPLETELY autobiographical tale.  My ghost story in an earlier blog was pulled from it.  That one is the closest I’ve ever come to putting in some serious work on a book.  I gave up on that one after about sixty pages because it finally dawned on me that it was just about the tritest thing anyone ever wrote. 

Anyway, this whole blogging thing — I’m enjoying it, when I’m able to do it.  Nights when I have no idea what to write about?  Well, then, usually I just don’t write, or I drag out something I already wrote.  I have one or two short stories and a bunch of bad poems, but I’m saving those for nights when I’m REALLY desperate. . . .

Even Vampires Get Writers' Block

Take Note

All throughout my academic career, there was one necessary studential (yeah, I know it’s not a word, but neither are ain’t, ginormous, or orientate – oh, wait, yes they are!  Don’tcha [working on that one] just LOVE English??  I do!) skill I just never mastered.  Was it beyond my ability to learn?  Maybe.  More likely, as with so many other things in life I haven’t managed to learn, I just wasn’t interested enough to take the time to learn it.  Note taking.  Yeah, maybe that explains why I didn’t finish college, though I think there are MANY other reasons and factors to explain that, but sure, I’ll allow that my inability to take cogent notes certainly contributed to my failure.

In some classes, teachers (and later, professors) were very helpful and would say, “It is imperative that you write this down,” then they’d write it on the board, and just for good measure, verbally repeat it several times.  Those were, sadly, about the only written notes I ever took.  And to compound the problem, I can clearly remember the one and only time in my life I ever reviewed written notes from a class, and the notes I reviewed weren’t even my own.  Instead of writing notes such as Mr. Dr. Cheney thinks the Pre-Raphaelites were early forerunners to the Existentialist movement (I talked him out of it, but still only got a B in his class) or The claim has often been made that Friedrich Nietzsche was a Nazi, or at least paved the way for their ideology (ridiculous, a charge I won’t even dignify with a response, except this one, which is just to say I won’t respond), I’m chagrined to admit, I doodled.  It’s a nervous habit I’ve had since I was a child, one that continues to this day.  I draw pictures or, more often, geometric patterns which sometimes turn into pictures, or don’t.  Regardless, I always complete my doodles with shading, to give them a little depth and because I used to feel that I could’ve made a career in art if someone else would’ve drawn the pictures and allowed me to shade them.  Pictures of this, pictures of that, completely meaningless and nonrepresentational line drawing of the other, by the gallon.  No actually useful notes, though. 

But listen. . .  to THIS. . .

I have an ability that I’m sure MANY other people must also have, but I have yet to meet anyone else to make this claim.  I can look at any doodle I’ve ever drawn and tell you, with a large degree of accuracy, what was going on in the background when I drew it. 

So, f’rinstance, I once drew a caricature of Captain America, from the shoulders up, with a frightened expression on his face and “movels” (comic book fans will know these as the little lines around a drawing that indicate movement) to show that he was trembling.  I even captioned the drawing as “Captain Ascared”.  Hey, I was only a college freshman, whaddaya want, huh?  Anyway, when I look at that drawing, I can tell you that it was completed in Dr. Robson’s ethics class, and it’s the reason I remember so clearly the conversation we had about whether we believe we exist as merely the outward expression of our metabolic processes, or whether there is something outside that which survives when those processes end.  Not only that, but I also remember the professor’s delectable daughter was in the class, and she gave a rather impassioned (and, in my opinion at the time, wrongheaded) proof of why there’s more to us than the sum of our parts.  And when I say, “I remember”, I’m not talking about a vague recollection — the scene plays out in my head as if I were watching a movie.

Another example.  The missus and I were sorting through some papers recently and I came across a doodle that shows a grid on one side of a vertical line, drawn in one-point perspective, with the suggestion of light being broken by the grid on the opposite side of the line.  Picture a window in a corner, and light shining through it onto an adjacent wall.  No, it wasn’t a drawing so much as noodling around with a pen and some graph paper.  A six-year-old might’ve drawn it, except it wasn’t a six-year-old.  It was me, at about twenty-six years old, doodling in a notebook while a PBS documentary about Mary Todd Lincoln played in the background.  I don’t remember a lot about the first half of the documentary, but while I was doodling, they went into great lengths describing how completely nuts Mary went after Abe’s untimely demise.   Again, I remember it as if it were happening again.  I even remember that the doodle I doodled was inspired by an image in the program — had I completed my imitation, there’d be Mary standing to one side of the window, stricken expression on her face, arms folded across her bosom.  She looked completely forlorn.

I’m sure there must be a term for this sort of thing (anyone who just said insanity or lack of meds must now go to the back of the class and put their head down on their desk), but I’ve never come across it. 

You might ask (I know I would!), “Why didn’t you just rely on your doodles, then, and do well in school that way?”  Well, here’s one of the other, and far more important, factors in my academic failure — inconsistency.  I didn’t always doodle, so yeah, I’d remember bits and pieces of what was discussed in class one day, but I’d miss entire swaths of stuff while, rather than doodling, I was nodding off, or staring out a window, or — well, you get the idea.  I’m far better equipped for college now, as an adult, and I do occasionally think about going back, but I think my reasons for wanting to do so now are too “artsy” — I only want to go to learn more about the things I want to know more about.  I don’t care about getting a degree or anything, I just want to study things I’m interested in so I can, eventually, truly know everything instead of just acting like it.