So, I’ve decided to write. A thoroughly useless endeavour. Words seem pretty useless as you type or scribble them. In a conversation, at least some feedback from whichever poor soul is left listening to your ramblings adds some value to your words. But writing fails in a very plain sense.
Even this piece I’m writing now, when I imagined it in my head it zapped around my head and pushed me into an excited fire. I felt the power surge through my body and felt compelled to spill the contents of my head out for all to see. I sprinted home in an excitement, foregoing the post-gym shower I desperately needed in favour of opening my laptop and doing the work that would blaze brilliantly off the screen, a golden word document.
A few minutes into typing, that lightening bolt feeling fades, and suddenly, like a post-ejaculation comedown, the excitement dissolved, I clumsily heaved my lacking vocabulary out from the keys. I am just typing awkward sounding, silly sounding words in an era where reading doesn’t fulfil the purpose it once did. I can’t compete with any amount of timeline scrolling. The page runs out of steam and I look back at the few hundred words I’ve bashed out and feel uncomfortably that I even bothered to try.
Having said all that, this is likely the fundamental struggle of the craft. It gives me some confidence that Aaron Sorkin said something along the lines of: he would spend hours writing, trawling through bad writing until he wrote himself into a tiny morsal of something good. And then repeating.
It’s the stuff that is heartening to hear and imagine. The good stuff is buried beneath pages and pages of rubbish. Even when you watch a popular youtuber’s early videos. They’re grainy, the audio is naff, the personality of the person is in an odd, embryonic form. Then you fast forward five or six years later and the videos are crisp, the editing is Hollywood, the person bursts onto the screen and hurtles out their performance from the black mirror.
The shiny, sexy, good stuff seems as though it’s always been there. Though really you can see the hours in the video editing gym that they put in. You don’t get the shimmer without the dull, painful lifting. I am now operating in that sphere. I am ready to drop my flabby, weak body into a rigorous muscle workout that will leave me sore, each day, for months.
All in the hope that I am contributing to a slow and embarrassing ride that will eventually bear fruit of work that does not creak awkwardly but obliges just a sliver of attention from any distracted eyes.
