Day: August 7, 2022

As I previously admitted, I have a tendency to watch bad TV. I’m not big on the tik tok, but I will slip into 2-20 minutes of bad youtube because it is small and light and easily digestible. That tendency lessens in terms of reading. I am very hesitant to put up with a bad book because of the time and thus commitment involved in doing so. However, I wake up to a stream of useless articles designed to further my need to read more articles in the same vein. They string me along dropping the barest tid bits of digestible information like ET chasing M&Ms (Reeses were used for the film adaptation).

That stuff is garbage. I have a tendency to absorb garbage–so much so that my tolerance for deep intellectual or thick academic writing is utterly weakened. Unfortunately, it is that deeper intellectual and scientific stuff that I need to be absorbing in order to know what is next. Presently my writing is referential of what other people tell me is next–which is of course referential of something else. My writing feels like literary hearsay or a distant cousin of plagiarism that has me absolutely disappointed with what I am trying to create.

Garbage is coming in and being filtered through my brain like junk food for the brain, and not much good is getting in around it. Therefore, the solution to the problem is to get back to reading and even watching better stuff. A writer needs to have an intimate relationship with their subject–not a referential one. The writer who studies myth and medieval lore will produce a better and more original and insightful product than the writer who read Game of Thrones and decided, “I can do that.” I believe this to be the rule. I believe this to be the way.

I’ve written on Idea Archives at length. The general idea is to have a book in which you write down as many ideas as you can whenever the come to you. I pretend to keep an Idea Archive, but the reality is a mess of books and slips of paper that I don’t ever actually go back to. Which is the subject of this particular blog. I recently decided to return to a past idea for a science fiction story focused in a corporate dystopia. Yeah, I know the concept isn’t new and neither are the characters. The theme is my own and one that clearly charts where we are to where we appear to be heading with an idea of that space as the middle ground and looking backwards and forwards from that moment in time like we are looking backwards and forwards from our moment in time right now.

I’m going to be spending more time on that story over the next year. I might even write it.

The point is that I did go back and look at what I was thinking about in the moment and update it based on my current thinking about the world and the current state of the world. Those factors–especially where I am at emotionally and psychologically–help me to move the idea forward. That is what I think you need to do. I think you need to go back to your old ideas as a moment in time to think about who you were and who you are and where you are with those ideas. That is how you drive your creativity forward.

Some Thoughts:

1. In that odd place with football where I am just ready to get these games going! Usually I have youth ball at this point to occupy my particular fixation. However, I am trying hard not to think about the youth game. Heck, I don’t even want to spend too much energy speculating on the High School game. I just want the games to get going so I may enjoy them.
2. Speaking of things occupying my mind, a conversation with my partner made it clear that I fixate on different stuff when I am home and that stuff, as consuming as it is, is negative and consumes me. Here feels like an impossible situation, which leads instantly to the solution of leaving when I know that leaving absolutely confirms that I am not the person I intended or wanted to be. Nobody seems to understand that but me. Perhaps nobody realizes why that matters. Nobody has to. I accept it. Just as I will accept whomever I am going to be.