Schrodinger's Cat

Writer writing about writing the writing that he is writing

Dreamed about playing a steak-cooking/bathwater duet with Ant Donaldson. Before that one about reading a Canadian comic book, which said the Canadians had a bad record for treating Japanese prisoners of war. Letters page had some NZers writing in with information on NZ plants and train crashes.

Spent the last couple of days stuck indoors because of the rain. It wasn’t possible to go to Paekakariki on Monday as the trains were cancelled. It actually suited me quite well as a chance to work on the jazz book chapter that I’ve had hanging over my head for the summer. I got some writing done – actual writing as opposed to sitting around drinking too much coffee and procrastinating. With such crappy weather summer seems to be fizzling out, kind of a pity since this week’s my last chance to work outdoors. I’m sure that when I start my journalism course next week it’ll be fine and sunny outside while I’m stuck in a lecture theatre. It’ll be weird being a student again. It has its good and bad points. My student allowance comes to just less than my living costs, not sure why students have to be treated as second-class citizens. You’re financially better off on the dole, at least in the short term. There was me so proud to have paid off my loan last year - now I can turn around and get another one.

Writing’s a bizarre lifestyle, I’m sure the act of getting amorphous thoughts down into shape on paper has some kind of physiological effect. Supposedly in the ancient world people had much more powerful memories, like the guy who could recite the Aeneid backwards or the general who knew all of his soldiers by name. Writing is a useful tool but has maybe actually diminished our powers of memory. Writing externalizes thoughts, so does that mean that it actually takes something out of the writer? I made a series of music albums, which I think of as writing projects as much as music. I like doing music as I have no natural talent for it, whereas I was told since primary school that I was good at writing – which has led to a lot of feelings of inadequacy & pressure. The good thing about the albums is that they’ve preserved snapshots of my mind at different stages through my late teens and early twenties. I’m now a different person but my earlier selves have been preserved. The problem is that while on one hand each has a development & progression from the previous one, on the other hand each one seemed to have a higher psychological price tag. The first one was easy (if amateurish), the second I spent a lot of my own money and pissed some more experienced musicians off by being disorganized, the third I had to get very introspective and alienated my girlfriend, the fourth was an instrumental group effort so actually quite easy & a relief, and the fifth coincided with the ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ disaster that led me to start this weblog – the result of a disturbing inner deadness. The album’s good though - a reverse Dorian Gray situation?

I also wrote a series of short stories in 2002 and put the better ones (that actually got finished) together into an 80-page book. I’ve made 50 copies so far, should probably run off a few more. I think it stands up reasonably well, though there are one or two cringe moments. A lot of it’s based on my first couple of years in Wellington, so again now that the past has been fictionalized & transferred to paper it’s gone out of my head and become something else. Writing fictionalized quasi-autobiography I’ve found it hard to get back to my childhood ability to just make stuff up though – hope I can rediscover this. Growing into adulthood seems to be a kind of solidifying process, things get less freeform. It’s harder to write songs too. I seem to be at the point which Bob Dylan, referring to his mid-late 70s work, described as ‘having to learn to do consciously what I used to do unconsciously’.

Writing non-fiction is a lot simpler. It’s a hell of a lot easier to get published than creative writing too, especially if like me your artistic tastes are a bit leftfield. It does have a tendency to hang around overhead and dominate time though. I’m hoping with the journalism course that having a quota of forty stories to get published will give enough pressure for me to learn how to ‘just do it’ rather than wasting a lot of time. Last summer I was writing an article on ‘Grooves of Glory’, the final play by the late Alan Brunton – difficult to write, I wasn’t particularly happy with it, and it coincided with a bad period in my life. Brunton died just after I offered to write it which put added pressure on as there was a sudden increase of interest in his work and I didn’t want to embarrass myself. It got published though, in the current issue of Illusions which you can get at the library, and didn’t seem so bad when I saw it. This summer I’m writing a history & analysis of the Space for a book on jazz in NZ – easier to write but bigger. Next summer when the course finishes I’m not keen on the idea of working for a small newspaper somewhere. I’d rather get another outdoor job and in my spare time sit down to the real challenge of writing a novel – I should do one before I try and travel overseas as there’s more than enough material in my own life in NZ if only I can see it properly. Having experienced some weird things last time I did some sustained creative writing I’m a bit nervous. Will my sanity be the price? Am I the only one who experiences this?

For the sake of transparency I’ve also started keeping a weblog instead of a diary, and I have a website to put up stuff about my creative works, so instead of telling people individually what I’m up to or thinking about I can just say ‘go see the website’. I’m going to be doing a lot of writing over the next year – by the end of it will there be anything left of me at all?

Go see the website - http://fiffdimension.tripod.com

Posted by fiffdimension at February 18, 2004 09:57 AM | TrackBack