Sunday 1 April 2012

So I guess I put off/forgot about writing this for two months

Writing about writing is hard. I often think that people think that since I write I should be able to express myself well. In my opinion, the truth is the opposite. I think that most writers write because they have trouble expressing themselves in conversation. I write because I live inside my head and it is easier to get out the stuff from in there when I am by myself, without anyone staring at me. I have never been good at making jokes spontaneously. I used to rap. I was awful at the actual rapping: the flow, the breath control, the enunciation, the swag. I was even worse at freestyling. The one thing I think I was any good at was writing the lyrics themselves.

At first I mimicked my favourite rappers. I learned various techniques from them. I ticked off the various skills. Punchlines. Metaphors. Multisyllable rhymes. Internal rhyme schemes. Blah blah blah. It took a long time for me to begin writing verses about anything but how amazing I was a rapping. It was when I stopped boasting about how skilled I was that I realised how skilled I wasn't and started writing things other than raps.

Of course the timeline isn't that simple. I was trying to be a writer at various times before then. When I was nine I wrote the fourth Harry Potter book before JK Rowling did. When I was a little older I wrote the first page of an epic fantasy novel and then never returned to it. I wrote various stories and poems that I thought were fantastic and my parents encouraged. Blah blah blah I guess writing has always been a thing for me whatever.

Now I think about writing every day. I think about novels, and novellas, and stories, and poems, and chapbooks, and collections that I want to write and the intricacies of all of these. I think about my career. I think about collaborations. I spend a lot more time thinking about writing than I do actually writing. I also spend a lot more time thinking about reading than I do actually reading. I read reviews and blog posts about books and built detailed ideas about the books without having read them. I often find myself disappointed when I read a book because it fails to live up to the version of it I created in my mind. I am certainly more often influenced by these dream versions of books that I create than their paper and ink relations. As I said earlier, I live inside my head blah blah blah

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