The Broken Promise – An Ode To Writing

Here I am again, that’s twice in less than 3 days that I’ve found myself blogging – that’s a pretty good streak so far.

Anyway I’m here to talk not about Phenomenalism like promised, but something else. It’s something that has been on my mind this past week and it’s one of the struggles that I face when I write.

This particular week, I have found myself swamped with Creative Writing homework. Now in my second and final year of the course, we are revisiting the bread and butter of our entire workload – coursework. At 60% of the grade, 4000 words of one particular form of writing + 2000 words of commentary, coursework is the foundation for my final grade at the end of the year and logically, with that comes a shit – tonne of pressure and time put into it. Now don’t get me wrong,  I love writing, typing up 4000 words of something that is completely made up and allows me to express myself is great but my goodness is it hard work.

At the time of me writing this, I’ve actually just completed a piece for a Halloween themed competetion called The Lodger. It’s a fictional (sorta) horror story in epistolary style. I really don’t know where the idea came from but I just remember trying to get to sleep one night and thinking of a narrator who begins by thanking the reader for taking the time to actually read what ‘he’ has written. He would then go on to talk about the concept of time, its implications on our society before talking about how things like irony and coincidence are ‘insignificant significances’ in our lives; making time go by quicker or some rubbish. Anyway, turns out that the narrator has now found habitation in the reader’s home and all the droning on about time was just a way of stalling them while he got comfortable. Honestly, I think it was an interesting idea and connected well together in the end yet I feel that it simply wasn’t executed well enough and that’s what is going to keep me up tonight. How could I have made it better? I already fine-tuned it so much, what could I have done differently? In the end, it’s irrelevant. I’ll get my feedback, it’ll go in the competition and it may or may not be a decent contender. Either way I’ve lost precious minutes of sleep over it and my chances of falling asleep in Sociology last thing tomorrow have sky-rocketed.

I don’t think there was a meaning to this post, if there was then I’ve done what I always do when I talk for too long and forgotten the point I was getting at. I guess you could say that doing something you enjoy can sometimes present itself as a double-edged sword and be more of a pain at times but if it truly gives you pleasure (hate that word) or meaning in life, then you’re going to continue doing it anyway, and you know what, that’s alright.