Writing...

I tried to practice some free writing the other day.  This is what I came up with.  I was trying to do a creative piece but I ended with some sort of meta-narrative on writing

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The fountain pen scribbled and sprinted its loops and dots across the blue lined canvas.  Ah, there it is, an example of over-statement!  Lined paper is a blue lined canvas!  How poetic!  How trite!  Is this what I find the most effective way conveying what I want?  No.  Its written how I think I’m supposed to write in order to sound like a writer.  

The act of writing is curiously about finding synonyms and allusions to our everyday.  It is a giant repetition of a world already known.  Cheers to those authors who can envision worlds that we have never dreamt or seen.  Dreams seem like a great space to wander about for mental photographs.  Maybe I should start there, yet I feel dreams are always fuzzy and underexposed.  They are hard to focus and I think we find ourselves trying to bring our everyday comforts into our dreams.  We rarely let a dream stand-alone.  It must mean something!  We say a dream is part of our sub-conscious, our understanding of the world that is there but hides in our blind spots of perception.  So a dream exists only from our own imperceptible recognitions in the everyday, and then what?  We convince ourselves that these leaks of hazy perception that come to us in dreams must have realistic relevance.  Why can’t we just transform a dream into another dream?  Let it cross over into another dream world, one that demands us to step outside of ourselves and give way to the waking dream of a world undiscovered by ANY part of our own reality.  Is this even possible?  To not be influenced in anything at all when it comes to creating.  Is it possible to let the twelve point times new roman escape the focus of our eye and set our fingers free to focus the lens of our mind’s eye?  It seems like a novel idea.  I must admit, it feels impossible.  

I do not appreciate novelty for novelty’s sake.  Creation and creativity aren’t such just because nobody has done it before.  I feel like a skill is required, some sort of mastery over the creative process.  But isn’t mastery relative anyway?  You are better at it then anyone else – mastery—only a term acceptable in its ability to place everyone else in mediocrity.  Isn’t that what’s happening?  Who can judge whether mastery means you are moving above everyone else, or whether everyone else is simply being placed below you.  It is about a movement of extremes.  You are down or up, on top or on the bottom.  Modern fiction today seems to do the same.  Modern novels are popular either in their ability to portray those things in life that are familiar with which we connect, or they are about a world utterly unknown and unattainable to the reader.  It is one or the other, so the option as the writer is to choose.  Writing realistically demands a keen sense of observation.  You must be able to replicate.  You must be able to take your own experiences and twist them just enough.  You must make a synonym of the world you’ve experienced and get it on paper.  The other option is to let your dreams run away from you.  Give them space.  Let them sneak out at night past the neat parameters of your understanding and keep them near enough to make out a shadowy form in the orange lights on the street corners of your imagination.