Writers Rage

Sunday, March 3 in the year of our Lord 2011

Caronport, Saskatchewan

Unsure, 11:22 PM

Weather = melting

Writer's Rage. [content warning: swearing ahead]

I wish to tell stories, I wish to weave tales and bring them to life as only a master writer can. The words do not flow to paper and my mind does not relish them like it used to. Tonight I am frustrated because I wish that I had kept up my writing, even though it was never good enough for my standards. Perhaps if I had forced myself forward I would have gotten better.

This like all things would take time and effort, time and effort that is divided among the other aspects of my life. Damn you entrenched habits! But I will not give up. Oh no, I might not have the words tonight but I will take stock of what it takes to make this happen.

A professor of philosophy once told me that if I wanted to be a better writer then I must read classical writing. Classical writing is the foundation from which anything worth keeping is built on. They deal with the enduring, the eternal, and they are masterfully written. Unfortunately, I don't even know where to start with that. But I know where to find out.

It will be work, ugh... so much work. Damn you lazy and undisciplined mind! Why must you be so dull and foolish!

I'm sure that I have many reasons for blaming my past. I used to write all the time and I was constantly frustrated because I knew my work was mere blather of a yet to mature 3rd to 12th grader. None of it was worth reading, it was an endless stream of emotion pent up from a miserable experience in the public education system which is another rant that I need to get out of my system later. My writing was futile, an endless story with no plot, poorly written, little more than the scattered fantasies of a brooding youth. What I want is excellence. What I want is to make the reader weep because the writing strikes at his very soul and confronts him in a manner that makes him face the reality of the eternal things. I want my writing to be a channel of God and of His truth. What I ended up creating was a poorly translated interpretation of the silly adventures in my head. And here I am sad, because the adventures were not silly at the time, they were inspiration, manifestation of my very self and God's work in my life. Looking back though they appear silly. And they WERE poorly translated. How does one translate the deep thoughts of the soul or the inspirations of the mind on two dimensional paper? I tried, and I was always frustrated because I knew that it was not coming through properly.

Maybe if my bloody useless damned to Hell public English education had involved reading actual books instead of dowsing my spark early in life then I wouldn't be 15 years held back! I think that I actually loath this system, yes I'm quite sure of it. I loath the fact that we dumb down everything so that people learn nothing. It was quite damaging to me. Pointless assignments about boring books from teachers who were bound by a curriculum designed by morons. Yes, morons. Morons who somehow managed to take a subject with the highest potential of learning, fun, and encouraging study and creativity and turning it into a tasteless... no, bitter, numbing, creativity sapping, tedious, and pointless task. It killed my love of reading. The only reason I continued on with writing was because one teacher had the boldness to go against the curriculum and read us a story that fed my imagination for years and then had us write our own stories. I had never ever been so excited for an assignment before or since. I was the first one to read my story. Me! Quiet Greg! I read my story first in the grade seven class, and it was eighteen pages long! At the end my class clapped for me, the clapped longer for me than they did for any other story. Then I had to endure five years worth of useless crap in which I never learned anything. I learned how to structure a sentence in grade three, I learned how to write an essay in grade five, and I learned how to write a story in grade seven. Everything since then, useless. A choice between two of three Garbage books that were rammed down our throats every year and then we had to answer a myriad of shallow questions which only served to prove that we did our infernal readings so we didn't fail the class. I never new what English really was until I got to college, it is fascinating and beautiful and I am astounded at the fact that public education succeeded in making it a boring and irrelevant class.

But I must come to terms with the fact that what happened has happened and that it does not dictate my future. I might have a natural aversion to books now, but I have the power to work through that. I just have to want to. Unfortunately my desires are quite fleeting and I regret the fact that I have come to this point several times before and have never been able to keep at it.

At this point you might be wondering what brought this on. I found a story that provoked my imagination and sent me back to 7th-12th grade when I wrote, striving to capture the inspiration that kept me going. It sparked a creative new idea for a game that I play storyteller for and I have been hard at work creating a framework to make it happen. Also, a good friend of mine is a fantastic writer who has people literally begging her to write books. I may be slightly jealous that she has come so far, knowing that I could have done the same but was held back and also held myself back. I know that I could be so much better, that my life could defined more by writing than by pointless video games. That spark burns within me. God has put it inside of me, the spark that ever hungers for knowledge and wisdom. Not that I would call myself knowledgeable or wise, but I thirst of these things. And to write, to be able to speak to another man's soul about an eternal question. So I am frustrated and angry that this has been denied me. I have so many stories uncompleted, none of them even worth completing it feels like.

The thing that always stops me is the drag of life on my desires. I am not disciplined. I never learned it. Everything from food to laundry was done for me and I never had to try in school to get by. All I did was play video games and try to write when it was an obsessive passion. I never did homework, except for when I absolutely had to. I never had to lift a finger to get good food or a clean house, I had no friends to speak of save maybe one or two that played video games with me, all I did was video games. I wish that I had read books instead. Video games stimulated my mind, they made me think. Problem solving, logic, storyline, strategy, it was far better than watching TV which is passive and talking about movies, farming, and pointless movies with my peers never struck me as an option worth considering. I don't think they were stupid, they were just interested in other things, simple and shallow things. Contemplating the meaning of life, hypothesizing about time travel, and sharing my deep fascination with fantasy didn't seem like appropriate conversation topics to engage in. But I always end up going back to video games as the thing that I do in my spare time. They are fun, stimulating, accessible, challenging, and probably one of the very sweetest of tasting ways to sabotage my potential. So I'm uninstalling them. All of them. Good bye and good riddance, if folks like CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, any of the profs on campus or my friend that I mentioned earlier can pursue the same things that I earn for and achieve them then so can I. I know that I can, so what will stop me.

Lack of community has been an enemy of the past. Nobody save my grandparents read my writing and maybe my parents eventually. This one is painful. If there was one thing that I wept bitterly about it was lack of community. If my writing was ever fueled by pain or anger then this was why. No friends, feeling like an outcast, even the supposed Christians had no interest in me. Bullying in elementary school made me put up barriers of uncaring, almost the same as how Severus Snape blocks his mind. By the time I reached middle and high school I had detached completely and was dying inside the walls I put up to keep everyone out so they couldn't hurt me. I think my writing is what preserved my sanity and my spark of life. I poured myself into it, and was constantly frustrated because I knew that although I was pouring everything I had it was still inferior, not worth reading by the average reader. And this is where it got really painful, I could not convince my closest friends, my English teachers, or even those I loved most to read what I wrote. I could not get any feedback any advise, any suggestions or any acknowledgements of anything from anyone save my grandmother who kept every copy of every story and whose encouragement has always meant so much to me. I poured everything I had into my writing, it was how I coped with the rejection and mind numbingness of high school. To write stories for specific people and wait years for them to actually read them compounds the pain that fueled the writing in the first place.

I'm not sure how much progress I've made on this one. I don't feel pain about this anymore but I do still feel anger. I have a community now, which has been a huge blessing. My past does not determine my future and my present is very good.

So, what is stopping me from writing.

Lack of know how.

I will read classical literature in order to learn how, and I will write to teach myself

Fickle Desires. Poor use of time.

I will uninstall all video games and schedule myself time when I must write and get help from my community.

Fear

Damn you to Hell Fear, you do not control me!

I've had writers block for three years now and I refuse to simply let this dream go. If I do not use something it will eventually be lost. I refuse to lose my spark. It will be hard to change my habits, but nothing is impossible and I refuse to let go of this hope. I will not be bested by laziness and I will not accept drifting about at the Master's level.

Greg Out