Writing

Pardon the cliche, but writing is like a river

The river flows, and it flows quickly. Words follow words. There's  blocks, but they're like landslides on a river: they're followed by an outflow of words. Surging ahead, one letter on the keyboard after the other ( i considered myself a pen and paper person until i realized whatever I wrote on paper would have to be typed anyway, and I'd too all the donkey work of reading my dirty handwriting). Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. But the words flow.

Sometimes, you think it went well. You close your eyes and type into the screen whatever comes to your mind. You stretch your sentences far beyond their breaking points, you don't even need to look at the screen, you keep on typing while you're talking to other people engrossed in conversations, and the fingers to all the work. Everything doesn't have to be world class- you just have to keep on writing and writing and writing, and then reading what shit you write, so you know what a bad writer you are and man do you need to improve, and you start noticing patterns in your writing, you start noticing patterns in your writing, you start seeing the flaws, the rags that join your tattering poncho. You try weaving better ones. You won't succeed and you keep on writing and writing and writing.

But you would have thought wrong. The writing is not always as smooth as you imagine it is when you write. Your sentences are obstacles to yourself. What you consider to be a flow unhindered by grammar is a shit of rock no one wants to read, because seriously dude, did you write that unpara'd 1200 words with only three fullstops? Really?

That is still salvageable though. Language matters, but what matters more is what's in your writing. For me, being honest is all that counts. You should be able to tell your deepest darkest secrets to the reader without ever letting them know that you're a very very disturbed individual, like every other individual, and instead convince them that you're a master of personas, the king of conversations, the mahaguru of nuances, and the emperor of emotions. In your mind, they're real, because everything's so sick and stupid, and man, you should really see a therapist, but in the pages as words, they become stories other minds secretly tell themselves are not real, and neither are their own dark thoughts.

Honesty is important. Often, to add flourish to your unremarkable writing you add curves and hickorydickory pakhey phrases because you can, not because it adds anything at all to your story. You're lying in your stories because you're distracting the reader from the version of reality in your head to a distracted version, one that got sidetracked because you wanted to show them that you're hip, you're cool, you're not conventional bro.

They are lies. Those pieces don't deserve to exist. Don't kill them, though because they serve as reminders of what not to do. Don't lie to your readers. Serve them the version of reality that your head tells you to, not that you think you need to. It's always wrong, dead wrong, and it will embarrass you in the future. But that's good, because that embarrassment is what pushes you onwards. You realize you are not in your prime, you are nowhere near your prime. And that's when you know the only way is upwards. You keep writing, not because you are good, but because you can always get better. Always. Unless they give you the nobel prize. Then you can't get any better, and you're so totally screwed, and you should totally stop writing and go to bed. The cows have returned home.