When are you an interesting writer?

sus

Well-known member
I'm reading enough / enough's bubbling up that at some point it becomes a flow, and then you just channel it onto the page.
 

kumar

Well-known member
The other one that gets me is people saying you have to have something you want to say, you have to want to write. if I give that any thought at all then I realise I have nothing to say and don't care about writing.
the trouble with putting weight on your "natural" abilities like this, "you have to be obsessed" etc, is that you ignore the fact that a good deal of your environment is dedicated to not inspiring you to care about any of these things whatsoever.

anyone who wakes up and says with a straight face "i've got something i want to say" is either a maniac or had overly enthusiastic parents. your parents, mates, partners, schools, bosses and jsa work coaches have spent your whole life conspiring to suppress your soapboxing tendencies. This is often useful to prevent you defending trenchcoat flashers at speakers corner, but its something that has to be considered whenever you reflect on the creeping sense that you might not care about something like writing as much as you'd like to.

besides the fact that if you had something you wanted to write it would already be written, the only reasonable and humane response to giving any thought to the question is, like you say, that you have nothing to say and don't really care. the wind is blowing through the trees and theres a flood in vietnam. who can write at a time like this! hang up your boots. but like many things worth doing its a process and no one cares anyway.

when you fall in love with somebody you don't automatically become a devoted doting spouse. you have to chop off limbs and change your pants and smelt yourself into a contorted new dedicated lover. you cant just "act natural".
 

luka

Well-known member
The paste lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
 

luka

Well-known member
Writing is just an externalised form of thinking feeling dreaming fantasising and no one goes to bed concerned about having nothing to dream about.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
While I was writing Brand I had standing on my desk an empty beer glass with a scorpion in it. From time to time the creature became sickly; then I used to throw a piece of soft fruit to it, which it would then furiously attack and empty its poison into; then again it grew well again. Is there not something similar to that about us poets?
- Ibsen
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I don't think you can persuade yourself to be a writer or a musician or whatever, it's more of an instinctive reaction to being so into listening to music or reading books that you feel like "I have to try that". Or perhaps you happen to try it and you find you love doing it. I think the greatest writers have something to say/express but it wasn't having something to say/express that got them into it, if ya smell me.
 

luka

Well-known member
Who cares about being the greatest writer anyway it's a ridiculous way to think about it like Kumar was saying. It's just the quickest possible route to self actualisation and the godhead or you can just choose to go grey and feint and fade away. See you later.
 

kumar

Well-known member
I don't think you can persuade yourself to be a writer or a musician or whatever, it's more of an instinctive reaction to being so into listening to music or reading books that you feel like "I have to try that". Or perhaps you happen to try it and you find you love doing it. I think the greatest writers have something to say/express but it wasn't having something to say/express that got them into it, if ya smell me.
well i dont know i think some people do get persuaded just at the age of two or three or whatever. or rather they dont get talked out of it. one way of looking at it is i had encouraging parents who patted me on the head when i did a drawing and so on, and after long enough you develop enough of an attachment to that dopamine affirmation so that if you stop making something which feels at least mildly life affirming in the way drawing or making music or falling in love might, you will get the junk sick withdrawal feeling that some people would describe as the Need To Write.

that is a fairly flat and uncharitable way of looking at it but i dont think i see the line in the sand where you say, hang on, no life affirmation for you youre 34 youve left it too late son
 

luka

Well-known member
I didn't have encouraging parents they told me I was paste so I would have to get a normal job and downsize my ambitions. And then the pleasure lies in refusing. It's a more attritional bloody minded spiteful affair.
 

kumar

Well-known member
but in any case the drive can be partially understood as an early years response to authority, often a spiteful one. which confuses the idea of an "instinctive reaction" to create things later on in life.
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't care if version and Corpsey want to be paste anyway we can be famous without them who cares see you later losers we're on the highway to famous
 
Top