Late at night, but I am inspired to make something. Let the following be a transcript for a thing I want to make. Placing words down like a jigsaw puzzle. I place one word down at a time. The key is habit. I need to write and create as habit. I played Dungeons and Dragons today and it was a good excuse to stretch my creative muscles. Just placing a thing here and a thing there and just procedurally generating the world as my players approached different things. It was good fun. I find that when I start writing words come naturally, but it can be difficult to find a thing to talk about. I can form ideas, but my mind is unable to form the putty to make something into a coherent shape. Mostly these writings turn out to be the same thing sketched out over again with different metaphors. I feel my mind in more of a primordial soup of feelings and ideas than anything concrete. I just need to keep sketching to see what appear before me. I have been going to the art gallery to take inspiration from. On lunchbreak I quickly nip out and go for a walk to there. I am becoming acquainted with the various paintings. Eventually they might feel like old friends. I guess it is about seeing the same paintings over again where you can fully take them it. Seeing the same artworks again. Maybe a sculpture didn’t speak to you on the first or fifth viewing, but eventually the art with bubble up within your consciousness on the twentieth viewing and become something to you. You can start to have conversations with artists as you begin to see the world how they saw it. Sometimes it isn’t about trying to see things as someone else sees them, but to see the world through a new hence unforeseen lens. Literature works in much the same way. We read to take in stories and ideas, but the syntax and word choice also affects us in a deep permeating way. It is the reason why I like to read challenging modernist works because that was a period where authors become aware of the mechanics of affecting the subconscious, not that we didn’t do that in all eras with writing, but it was an era that this got crystalised in the artists’ heads. Many of the best writings from the late 20th century and early 21st century draw on these writers who pushed the envelope of literature in the modern period, authors like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. These authors would go onto influence authors like Vladamir Nabokov and Italo Calvino among others. Obviously, this list is not exhaustive, but it is undoubted the influence of modernism has in literature. Writing is a type of painting, but instead of the representational, you are playing with the linear and syntactical. They both play with symbols, but different forms of symbols. It is easier for something like a painting to be abstract, but abstraction is often incoherent in writing. Same with the precise and theoretical is difficult to place into a painting. I think a bit part of why Ulysses appeals to me is because it takes the multi-perspective angle of visual arts such as Cubism and applying that polyfocal view to the novel.