Yesterday, at about 9 PM, I told myself that, in the next twenty-four hours, I was going to do What I Want To Do (capitalized as such in my mind). Which was my way of saying, "You know what? This Saturday, I'm not going to do anything I don't want to do."
This attempt has led to me sending several things out for publication (I want to do things like that), watching Doctor Who (old stuff, with Jon Pertwee), texting an old buddy of mine about video games that I don't play and Doctor Who (there may be too much Doctor Who in my life), and planning out the complicated plans of my villains from an upcoming project. (The Palmer Zimmerman stories, for anyone who's reading this, knows me, and knows what I'm talking about.)
Well, it took quite a lot of time for me to actually get around to working on The Week of Dreams. In fairness, I was out and about for a lot of today (accompanying my aunt to places such as Barnes and Noble, Costco, and Barnes and Noble again). Though I did have a notebook with me and did some writing in that. I wrote an action scene in which Chris and Avalon shoot moths with a water gun in the library in the House of Impossible Things.
Now, I mentioned that scene, and that's important. You know why? I was worrying a bit today about writing and what makes me write. There seems to be this trend (or at least there was a trend in the 20th century) of writers writing because they had all these things inside them, all this torment and ecstasty and pain that they needed to expel through means such as writing, all this brilliant social commentary and ideas that they needed to show the world. Hence we have things like The Great Gatsby and 1984 and Hamlet. Wait. Hang on. Hamlet wasn't a 20th century piece. But it's the same basic principle, and my point is that I don't write for those reasons. I don't really feel like I have anything to say beyond what I say in my everyday life (it's like my life is an ongoing performance piece or something). I don't have difficult emotions that other works don't express as well and that I can't just as easily enjoy therapeutically (Doctor Who comes immediately to mind). I'm not trying to create symbolic masterpieces anymore (I have a huge ego, but it doesn't make me think that I do great masterpieces).
I tried to make a list of reasons I write. Here's what it looked like:
1. It's a matter of habit.
2. I want to be Neil Gaiman.
3. It's fun to see if I can make money off of it.
4. I want to be remembered by people I don't know after I die.
5. It's a hobby.
Which is a number of reasons, but there are those who would not consider them especially worthy. So then I wondered if there were any deeper reasons that I wrote. Nope. No soul-baring purpose, no uplifting inspiration. It's a habit, I want to be Neil Gaiman, I want to see how much money I can make, I don't want to die in obscurity, and it's a hobby.
I remember that I came to some deep conclusion about why my writing is still valuable and brilliant beyond those five reasons, but I forgot it after we got to Costco and my aunt gave me money to get a Coke, which I drank as I planned out my villains' complicated schemes and wrote about Chris and Avalon killing moths with water guns.
Then I realized something. No matter how stupid it may be, no matter how selfish and petty a reason it is, I understood what made writing worth it. I get to tell people that I'm writing a part of my story where a guy and his dead girlfriend, brought back in his fantasies, run around in a library full of never-written books, shooting matter-eating moths with water guns. I'm reasonably certain that I'm the only person on Earth who can make those claims. (Unless someone else has written this and I wasn't aware of it, in which case I intensely want to meet this person and become their new best friend.) So I write to feel good about myself and be impressive? Well, I don't see anything wrong with that. Not right now, anyway. Does this benefit other human beings beyond myself? Maybe. But I'm deriving a whole lot of pleasure from it, and while I typically disapprove of my doing things that benefit only my pleasure, today is the day where I do What I Want To Do, and I honestly don't care. I think this is a good thing.
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