Beauty and the Boxer

I am, by any measuring system, a beginner in the writing craft.


At the same time, as I begin to lay the concrete foundations required to write  for a living around my cloudy desire to write for a living, I can't help but learn what I feel (even at this early stage) are important lessons.

Take that metaphor just now - concrete foundations around a cloudy desire -describing a combination of two mind sets. This hybrid process is something that pops up a lot.


For example, you're lying in bed and your mind has been running through ideas in it's cool down cycle for 30 minutes, maybe an hour. Just before the conjurer throws his cape over your consciousness and you lose yourself in the night of sleep your brain goes off like a gun dropped from the hand of a shaking old War Veteran defending his farm from coyotes.

It's an idea and your sleepy brain tells you is, 'the best thing you'll ever write'.

So you scramble for paper and a writing implement, scrawl a message that you'll understand in the morning, return to bed and let the conjurer work his magic.


You wake up with no memory of this until you roll over to face a wall covered in what appears to be lipstick. The message you've left for yourself reads: 'Two men are like hair in a beard. One longer than other. The razor misses one. You know what to do'... *


Thanks brain.



This is only a seed. One that will grow into a wild, unruled and bushy plant. A plant blossoming flowers shaped like politicians and weighed down with smelly, shoe-shaped fruit.

This plant will speak to you and try to convince you that it's important, that it's the best plant in the world and does not need to change at all, ever, ever.



This plant is lying to you.


This plant needs taken to the logic garden in your brain. There a small gardener who tolerates no small talk or distractions will prune the everloving shit out of it until, often, nothing but a few leaves remain.

He will come to you, shake his head and say, 'Try again,' before going back to his flower beds.

Bastard.

There's a hand off, a relay race exchange, between the two hemispheres of your soft coconut dome that enables good writing to exist.

Good ideas are always good in your head. Getting other people to experience that goodness requires simple, hard work.

Here the beautiful soft and inexperienced face of 'good idea' meets the hard, knuckle trodden fist of the prize fighter who hammers out the flaws in your work.

Better writers have written better summaries of this dichotomy. Writing it for myself I can appreciate just how truthful these summaries are.


The old cliché about everyone having a story to tell is right but I think it's missing a clause:

Everyone has a story inside them / which needs to be told by a writer



*This is a message I left myself... as far as I can tell. Whichever part of my brain is dominant at that time of night in that state of sleepiness can't write well.

Cathartic Onanism

I tried to get a few recent inspirations down on paper last night. I felt productive.

I made a great show of setting up a 'useful writing space' and then began tapping keys at random vomiting out the random thoughts splurging into my brain-pan.

It was cathartic onanism. Shameful yet it felt good. This is not how good writing is born.

I was a tourist in the land of make believe and it showed.

I must work on something internally until it's ready to come out like a mock documentary, like a history of events unfolded/unfolding inside my cranium.

I'll report rather than make up. 

That's probably best.

Happy Monday! :(

Relax dude, we'll do it tomorrow.

The psyche of a modern man can play tricks on the mind it inhabits.

Specifically the varying forces within a youngish man like myself can exert great control in subtle, some might say devious, ways.

To fully understand where I'm coming from, let's take a look inside my head.



It's very much like the inside of an elaborate, royal tent. The kind I imagine I've seen in Lawrence of Arabia. Though I've not seen that film.

Outside we can hear sand grating against stone; the wind pulses the walls of the tent inwards like waves viewed from a cliff top.

The tent is brightly lit and decorated in two corners, dimly lit and spartan in the other two.

Various characters are in turns frolicking and becoming immobile. Only one can occupy the centre of the tent at a time.

Here's that every-boyish, fun loving mischief maker: The Gamer. He spouts the usual tropes or conventional statements. He whispers to himself that he calls them 'memes' and giggles.

He recites his lines as if he's in a school play and he feels it more important to impress his friends and/or that girl that's caught his eye. I sit down with the various aspects that make up my soul and we pay close attention to this fool's performance:

"Relax dude, it's still 'early'. We're usually in bed an hour from now. Time enough for one last instance/multiplayer map";

"If we weren't gaming we'd just be spending all our time watching DVDs or TV or something";

"Dude! It's a work night so of course we simply CAN'T do [Chore X] tonight - We have to relaaaax. I'll let you do them at the weekend, when we've more time..."

Yes this sinister character, portraying himself in innocence and light is adept at manipulating the host's actions. More so than the other denizens of your inner world. The audience nod along with me.

Let's brush him aside for a second and try to listen to these other fragmented voices, howling from the murky corners of this vast, vast tent or sitting beside me amiably talking to themselves, or me. I can't tell. These guys and gals haven't had an audience for some time and it looks like they are bursting to share their views!

First up we have Career Guilt. A green, Chartreuse addicted bile spewer, he's been drunk and discontent ever since I received bad advice from that hack of a career adviser in school. He pulls himself up from a heap in one of the dark corners:

"Yep. That adviser knew nothing. The 90's were a changeable time, why didn't the school system take that into account? Is that justification though? Others in your position, same school, neighbourhood, age and so on came out just fine! Perhaps it's because you're a slacker. We, all of us in here, have known it for a long time. You've had some interesting adventures but why don't you APPLY yourself!?"

An uncomfortable question we all agree. However if we as a collective don't know how to apply ourselves career-wise and are not built to consider life with a mortgage, multiple bank accounts and consumer accoutrements as a real 'life' then what qualifications does this single figment of our imagination have? Less than us.

Put him back in the corner! We all jeer.

Next we have that harpy - Social shame. She rises from the darkest corner in a cascade of sand, like an insectoid dune creature ready to trap the unwary.

"Don't you call me a harpy you lazy, unhygienic, non-commital geek! I've a good mind to remind you that all your friends and most of your previous relationships tolerated your ridiculous and childish habit like a family puts up with a slightly retarded relation. That dark secret that everyone knows is wrong but no one dares say for fear of hurting someone's feelings." 

Quick squash her back into the sand!

To be fair we haven't listened to her in quite some time, the old ways are changing and any stigma attached to our gaming juvenile years has long been washed away like the remains of an exploded cetacean on a calm, sunny beach.

I address my motley crew:

"Is there any character in this misshapen tent-skull of mine that's got something better to say than Gamer Psyche?"

A small and wiry man materialises before me, descending a rope attached to, well nothing. He's bearded to the knees and wears only a loincloth. He taps me on the knee where I sit:

"Excuse me. Hello? Hi. Glad I got your attention. You ignore me quite a lot. You see those others, they're not like me. They're caricatured. They don't run alongside your world views. They're not meant to be taken seriously. They're easily defeated. Gamer Psyche," and here he points to the accused who has the good grace to at least pretend to look innocent in between fits of giggling, "he keeps them around for moments just like this - moments when you doubt the amount of game time you squeeze into a week. They solidify his position, rather than weaken it. 

I'm not like that. I'm you. I'm those ideas you have before you go to sleep that you really should pen down but you think 'Oh I'll recall in the morning'. I'm that feeling in your left lung, that light elation, that swells when you see something or feel something that you can't immediately qualify with just words. 

Others have called me your 'artistic side' but that doesn't do me justice. Beg your pardon if that seems a little arrogant but I'm not thinking about myself, more 'us'. 

You see you have things to say. Specifically to write. Much of society has been tailored to reducing my input to your person. So it is with any other version of me within any other person out there. 

I don't want you to stop playing games. We both know that they inspire you on many levels, like books, films, music. 

I do however want you to promise yourself you'll remember that this is consuming. Even the finest thing, consumed every day, won't sustain you as a person. You have to create! 

Your blog is a start, not as a path to anything better but as a habit to build on. A foundation for some proper creations. 

I hope you found that reasonable and not in any way accusatory. I'll be off now. I have some interesting trains of thought to conduct."

Well shit.


There's not much I can say after that. I get up and I leave the tent. I feel quite refreshed and once I cross the last dune and come to full consciousness again I immediately fill a blog page with what I've seen.


He did after all have a point.