Writing About Writing About Other Things

I’ve been twiddling my thumbs. Sat at my desk, preparing a bowl of noodles for lunch. Cut spring onion with scissors. This morning I went to the gym and was simultaneously bored and overwhelmed. Too many TVs. Whilst half-listening to a podcast I decided to rewrite my One Year of the Newsletter because the original is a patchwork and vague and something in its tone I found annoying.

The truth is I know very little about writing. So to write about writing seems as silly as me trying to write about rockets. I know there’s fire and metal but how those things are brought together is where you lose me. How can I reflect on a year of this practice? I still struggle to remember what a verb is. I have been told many, many times but for some reason I fail to recall. It’s similar to the amount of times my brother has told me what the Battle of the Boyne was about, he gets annoyed and explains and I forget. But that might be sibling contrarianism. I am a person who forgets everything and remembers hyper specific details. Memory seems of very little use to me.

I think I am more a creature of impulse than a writer. Writing just so happens to be one of those impulses. The only real change for my writing this last year is discipline, but I’d have you know, I tend to do things well when I’m supposed to be doing something else. That novel I’ve mentioned time and time again has maybe had ten pages written in the last year. It started it out of an impulse, a sentence popping in my head that I used for the opening and went from there, writing when bored at work. As I said, I probably should have been doing something else. Now I have all the time I need to finish it and yet, it’s trapped in an awful purgatory of being nearly written and hardly done. If I give things too long I tend to lose faith in them or get bored, like the original version of this essay, working on and off it for the last month, only for me to decide two days before it’s to be sent out to rewrite the whole thing. It is hard to be disciplined when all my best work seems to be last minute low effort. My best paintings, stories, essays, all the ones that seem to resonate are made by mistake. It feels as though I have no original ideas, I merely stumble into things.

I went out the other night, riding the impulse to go outside rather than the usual hiding out at home. I chatted to a lot of people, I am cursed to be given free shots whenever I go to a bar (it happens every time and I say no every time but then that impulse to indulge overtakes me). Maybe Americans are amused by my accent because I leave most of these interactions thinking “Christ, I’m such an asshole”. And I feel like the writer from the film Afire, because I jest and say things that are, if my tone is misunderstood, to be rude (and perhaps the tone does not matter at all). It’s all a show. I’m nervous so I get mean.

I spoke to a good friend, who is also loud, that we both worry that everyone hates us. Which coming from him is wild, because in my eyes, he’s one of the most beloved people I’ve ever met. We both feel that we are loud because we are scared, scared to fall into the background, to be ignored. So we joke, maybe say things we shouldn’t, cross boundaries with friends and strangers, because we want to prove we’re going to fuck it up anyways. Easier to self destruct than for people to just not like you for random, sometimes unknowable reasons. I don’t even know what it’s like to be myself.

On rare occasion it’s happened, where it’s like “Oh, there you are, I’ve been looking for you.” Only for the time to slip away. I cannot give examples because it is all too specific. But usually it’s when I’m not talking, to communicate through nods and gestures, letting music pass through or the sounds of sirens from the road. When I do not feel the need to explain myself. When the impulse to talk stops.

What can I say about writing? Like any writer, the want to tell stories started at a young age, I got on particularly well with my English teachers, wrote bad poetry. Standard writer histories. My only difference is maybe that I didn’t like reading until I was 18, I watched movies to satisfy my need for stories and I never felt like escapism was the reason. Writing was never about getting away from life or awkwardness or whatever growing pains were going on, it was to make sense of them. Even as an avid lover of Lord of the Rings from the age of 6 when people ask things like “If you lived in Middle Earth where would it be?”, those kinds of questions never interested me. I never wanted to live in Middle Earth, I wanted a big group of friends. And swords. But I have never wanted to leave Earth, even the bouts of suicidal ideation were never really about dying. I wanted someone to see that something was terribly wrong. Wanted change and the concreteness of the attempt. Reading and writing sad stories, rather than dispel or worsen my symptoms, helped me arrange their parts. I never felt the need to write or read a crime novel because all writing to me is one. Pick up the clues, set up, pay off, everyone has a dark secret or two to them. Writing is for control freaks and the crime novelist is the ultimate control freak. They’re so pedantic.

I have probably already written about growing up identifying with side characters rather than the lead. The comedic animal is where I saw myself because these characters tend to be silly and a bit annoying but still are loved. Being annoying and still lovable comes up a lot in my favourite stories. It’s perhaps why I love the genre of shitty protagonist goes through an existential crisis. We’re back to the film Afire again, because I knew from the get-go the protagonist, Leon, was a grumpy asshole and I loved him because I too am a grumpy asshole. I love characters who are annoying, frustrating and especially lost because if they’ve got a chance and can change maybe I can too. I love characters who are total messes but it can go overboard very easily. Too self-aware and they become annoying. A character can never be aware that they are a character.

I’m thinking about James Baldwin saying “The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it…If there is no moral question, there is no reason to write. I’m an old-fashioned writer and, despite the odds, I want to change the world.”(X). I try to imagine a person who would argue that writing does not change the world, or that one cannot change the world with writing, when one has been affected by writing? And yes, you probably can’t change the world, but I think about national parks having to ask people to stop building rock towers along rivers. The rocks which appear numerous, I mean, whats a few rocks? But that displacement affects the whole ecosystem. So perhaps it is better to say what is on your mind than to say nothing, because your words might reach someone who cares. Or at the very least you said it. Too many stories of people on death beds wishing they did this or said that, wishing they’d been less afraid. Baldwin always asks the reader to try, to speak and see the world a little differently. If we are dead set in our ways one is already dead. Without giving oneself the opportunity to prove themselves wrong, to no longer be surprised by the world, you’ve grown numb to it.

Writing forces one to not be numb. Yes, you can droll out a sentence, like any work it can be done lazily. But the effort to even write droll, you become self-aware in an instant. Maybe you crush the piece of paper between your palms and throw it in the bin. Or it collects dust in a ever growing mess of a notes app.

Sometimes the impulse to write will come after a drought and I’ll wonder where all these ideas had been hiding. It’s the feeling of the muse, connecting with the great storyteller from beyond. Or maybe I was just too dependent on inspiration. The point of this year of practice was becoming more self-reliant, not at the mercy of random ideas. To keep up the pace with life, to observe, to connect. I won’t lie and say I write selflessly. Perhaps it is selfish to write in order to connect with others, to talk about it. Everything I do is for other people and completely myself. It’s a contradiction I’m trying to understand better in my head.

I am still twiddling my thumbs and hope this makes sense.

Thank you for reading,

Enya x