Time to continue writing. This is another story about a person who has more ideas in his head than he has words to articulate. He explains, it’s like a glass bottle with a ship that has been carefully constructed, but it remains trapped within the bottle. Without smashing the glass it’s impossible to get the boat out without painstakingly deconstructing the ship with tweezers to get it out piece by piece; that is the act of writing to me.
But in truth it’s not like the ideas are even fully formed inside of me to begin with. I constantly need to be intaking input, whether that be film or literature to get the words and ideas to begin to start thinking about writing something myself. I second guess myself thinking, well this isn’t real writing; these are thoughts anyone could have. I should be making a story rather than just putting down words about making something. Remaining confident is difficult, but then these words are meant to be a raw articulation of myself. I’m sorry if there is no mystery or adventure. There are no characters in most of my writing other than myself. That could just be honest, is there ever anyone else in the writing process when you write? All those characters running around in other people’s stories loving and hating are just themselves in some cosmic sense. Sure, people seldom behave as their characters do, but in a sense isn’t whatever you write just you?
One of the greatest challenges of making art is just having thoughts. There are some creative works where you just head-empty make something following a process. Although I’ve found with most things made there needs to be thought process behind making it, whether that is something you are aware of at the time is another matter. We aren’t some kind of machine who simply follows a program where the result is art, we need to make decisions whether that is what material to use, or which design we are going to follow. Now that I’m thinking about it, the creative process for writing is quite different from that of knitting or oil painting. I guess for some people, writing can be a quite mechanical process where they almost follow an exact formula. I’ve never found it to be the case with my writing, but then again, I’m not exactly writing genre fiction where the plot beats are expected from the audience. I’m thinking what audience?
These pieces of writing seem to be scattered to the winds. I feel they are private and public at the same time. While I’m writing this, the only person who has read them is myself and I have no plans for publication. Right now, it’s just about putting words down and not caring that greatly. Yet in the future, who knows whom will read these words. Perhaps they will be culturally relevant some day? “Students, let us turn to page 41 of Chris Groenewegen’s collected writings and examine this paragraph…” That might not be likely, but I think on the grand scale of things we simply don’t know what will happen in the future. We can speculate, but we can’t know.
Memory is a fickle thing. Our memories can be unreliable, but at the same time we are our memories. We are stuck in this notion of the present where we need to know the past to plan. When you think about it, aren’t most of our thoughts comprised out of memories; is our language and selfhood not comprised this transient phenomenon?