(no subject)

[aliaspseudonym]

But his words, to my ears, were the whistling of wind
through the cracks in the rocks, where the foilage thinned
leaving only the moss speckled, snow-dusted stone
towering high o’er the trees so aloft and alone.
He’d have better luck asking the rock.

- excerpt from untitled long poem in progress
 

Alright then.

I have been distracted. I blame school essays; they create a situation where I strongly don't want to write the thing I have to write next, so I seek out a million distractions and establish bad habits that stick around after I've managed to force myself to write the things. Of course I'm also to blame for a lack of self-discipline in dealing with these essays, but ah well.

Time to make a conscious effort to write stuff. The longer I go without working on something, the more daunting the prospect of adding to it becomes. After a point there's a temptation to just start something new, but down that road lies a mountain of unfinished projects and a strong doubt about my ability to finish things at all.

On the bright side, I've been doing more art recently, partly to distract myself, and it's been pretty fun. I shall try to continue with that. Oh, also CreatorUnreal commissioned me to draw his RP character twice, and that went really well, so if anyone is looking for art commissions I am willing and able to oblige. More details at my FA account.

That said, my main point here is stop messing around, me. >:| You have cool stories to be writing. And one poem.

Now I start rambling to remind myself that producing words in large volumes is not actually that difficult, a fact that I just recently unlearned in Advanced writing class. Writing to a standard of incredible clarity elevates prose to something close to poetry, where every verb and subject and clause must work in perfect cooperation and absolute unanimity. For example, look at my first sentence in this paragraph. Is it sufficiently evident what 'a fact' is referring to? is 'actually' really necessary? I do tend to overuse that word. Come to think of it, ick, did I really write 'a fact that'? Maybe I should recast the sentence. 'Now I start rambling to remind myself -- as I recently unlearned in Advanced Writing class -- that producing words in large quantities is not so difficult.' Better. Ah em dashes, is there anything you can't do?

I like this sort of writing, to be honest, but it takes a lot of time and several drafts to do properly. What really inhibits my essay writing is -- again, as I recently learned, though really I already knew this, in Advanced Writing -- that it is impossible to write a good essay about a subject you do not care about. My prof suggested that you try as hard as possible to twist the topic, or talk to your prof to see if you can write about something you really do care about. Fortunately, most nobody cares about what they write about for school, so the bar in most classes is set rather low. >.> So I hand in essays I think are, if not good, the best I could manage for Advanced writing and less inspired essays for classes that do not have the word 'inspired' on the list of expected essay criteria. 'Profound' is also on the list.

I think I might have been able to care about my Defoe essay if I had had more time and fewer other essays competing for my attention. Oh well.

Oh, I also did lousy on my first ecology midterm x.x I need to start paying attention in that class and may need to buy the overpriced textbook, because I learn that stuff better by reading the more in-depth prose as opposed to the bullet points of information the teacher tends to give us.

 

 

Comments

[feathertail]

Re: writing stuff that isn't inspired, that's what I end up doing for Associated Content half the time. >.>b

Freedom is not caring about the quality of your work!
-- Dilbert