Of Verisimilitude

I have to warn you.

This post wasn't really built on a real experience, like most of the others.

Ironically, it is this reality that I'm going to speak of.

verisimilitude

noun

the appearance of being true or lifelike

- Oxford English Dictionary

I found this word - quite rare, I might say, as I've never heard of it before - while trying to find a genre in which I could place the things that I've written. Allegory is the closest that I found, even though I don't entirely feel it's totally appropriate. Rampant symbolism, I suppose, is not a recognized literary phenomen. Besides, allegories tend to have meanings that aren't merely beyond the literary text, but also in the text itself; whereas my texts tend to have something of a middle ground.

Either way. I've already written of my new idea in previous posts. I've started writing my rather liberal idea of an outline. Brainstorming it in my head when I wasn't occupied with other things.

And it's funny how I see my own style shape around it. Obviously, you know, I've only written a very little bit, but the way in which I write them seem to change in my head all the time. The steps between Raison d'Être and Mind at Rest - oh yes, if you do not love my titles, what do you love - are immense, in terms of style and thinking. Raison d'Être is certainly a piece I'm proud of, but all the same I can't look at it without criticizing my own style of writing. I wonder if the same problem harrowed the likes of Asimov, Stephen King, Poe... Obviously, comparing myself with literary masterminds, for they are nothing short of that, would be extremely preposterous, past the barrier of what is normally ironic and sarcastic (i.e., Smith with an I and Shakespeare... Never mind), breaking through onto the other side of anti-sarcasm.

This definitely inspires me to go on further, and analyze my own work as I write. And the definite movement I notice is that I strive for verisimilitude. Ach, I shall have to use it now. Just like sesquipedalian. I eschew some of the more abstract concepts and settle for stronger, more close-to-earth sets of ideas and settings.

Is this a good thing? I think so. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing it, would I? I haven't even started writing on, hah, Houses of Glass as we might call it for the moment (I think A Summer in Stockholm is my next bet), as I'm still very much in the outlining phase and just finished the first, rough draft of Mind at Rest - ironically branded as draft 4 since the previous drafts hadn't even got to the concluding period.

Yet I can tell that Houses of Glass will have more of a connection to real life than previous texts. This is also where I decide that I will spend a lot of time merging dialogue with descriptive text. Raison d'Être contained solely the latter, and Mind at Rest was built on the former. While I think that in my polishing stage of Mind at Rest will not only rebuild large parts of the conversation, certain parts of the debate will be expressed descriptively instead. However, I have no doubt that I will have to make it very symbolic in order to still get the gist of what I'm trying to say.

My next piece of short fiction - ah, I revel in that word, saying it over and over again in my mind - will use dialogue and descriptive text together, and will probably not be as symbolic overall. I find as I said in a previous post, Of Polyester, that I feel that much I write of is just so fake, so wrong, that merely thinking about it makes me ill. As such, I will leave most of this behind, and start working on fiction that is truly fiction and does not need to be compromised in order to reveal all of it's quality.

With that said, I don't intend it to be empty fiction. It's not a Hollywood movie script, or at least I intend it not to be. There is motivation, there is an underlying message, it's just not as underlying as it was in the works of philosophy, a-hah.

Ach, I wish I had an irony sign. Too bad it was never worked into the English language.

Quick notice, by the way: I know that verisimilitude does not constitute the act of being true or life-like, but the appearance of being so. The difference? Well, it's a contested matter, I suppose (and one I might take up at some forum somewhere), but to me, that sounds like while it is indeed fake, it has the appearance of being real. Madame Tussaud's wax dolls, for instance. They have verisimilitude?

How do you use that word, anyway?

Of Redirection

Three week mark passed by with me noticing very little. By the end of the week I always have a very faint idea of what to fill the next week with. However, it seems to me that by the time the weekend has passed, I've scheduled in drafts all the way up to Friday. What is it about weekends that make them magical muses?

I suppose I am just plain too bored by my day-to-day life that the relief that weekends provide seem to be filled with the most remarkable details and interesting ideas. 

I'm starting to think - and now we're changing subject entirely - that some of my posts must be filled with the worst garbage that the world has ever beheld. My English teacher is very keen on making sure that paragraphs and essays keep coherence and unity throughout; this I believe is largely unseen in the posts I make. And quite sincerely, I couldn't bother. However, I think from time to time that I might, just every once in a while, write a really cultivated, thought-out post. Maybe extend upon a topic I've touched lightly before. Like a minor article, even.

Would that be interesting? To me, probably, yes. To properly write an article like it should be written, consider it's subject and thesis and publish it online. However, whether or not it is relevant to the blog at hand I'm unsure. Then again, I've never stated a purpose of the blog as such, other than simply record my own progress in writing. While I so far have been focusing on trying to at least write a little fiction from time to time, maybe a dash of daring non-fiction might do the trick as well.

I have subjects, certainly. How about the taboo of being a student and criticizing the educational establishment? Oh, have I things to write on that. No matter how retarded, low-brow, and silly the exercises might be, so much as questioning the intent of the matter at hand is nothing short of heresy, as it seems. Or what would you think of the problems rising from an upbringing based on tolerant discipline, living in a world that has to defend it's libertarian values? It's such a lovely clash of values when my instincts tell me that everyone should be allowed to believe, to think, to say what they like, but that I in order to defend those values have to accept the breaching of them.

I was thinking about doing that in addition to writing my ordinary posts, even in addition to working on the short stories that I've started. Perhaps I ought to take a break in both of those and just attempt a non-fiction article on either of those subjects. Perhaps I will, even. If nothing turns up after "Of Verisimilitude" that I scheduled for Tuesday, or even that other thing that I drafted this morning for Wednesday, then perhaps one can expect that I'm working on something bigger.

Of Crustacean Invincibility

I probably have mentioned it in an earlier post, but I daydream. A lot. Always have done. Whenever I find myself in a relaxed situation, where nothing requires my direct input, I find myself thinking about the immortality of the crab (yes, I like new phrases every now and then). And I'm a vivid daydreamer - I wear that thousand mile stare that obscures the most detailed of ideas.

These daydreams, as daydreams often do, take the form of the perfect scenario - hero gets the girl, hero performs a major feat of heroism and is by general consensus a hero, or hero succeeds in a heroic task of some kind. Most often none of these are even vaguely realistic - so much, indeed, that as a child I firmly believed, among other things (including a creationist theory regarding the bellies of giants), that whatever I thought of would never strike true (Needless to say, my juvenile mind had thus no problem thinking about horrible accidents and deaths hitting people I knew and loved - obviously, that would never happen).

One of the later ones was obviously just the vague ambition of me writing a great epos of epic proportions, and making everyone want to read it because of some Disney-esque storyline, it being published by a major company and distributed all over the world. And then came the day when it was to be translated into another language, and being the bilingual that I am, I obviously took upon the task with great success.

This latter bit isn't actually as stupid as the rest of it. 

There's always been a minor debate within the Swedish literary sphere about translations and translators - whether or not a translated work can truly be considered to still be the work of the original author. It's not a huge debate, and I'm not sure how widespread it is outside of Sweden - unlike many of our European neighbours, we only translate to our native language what is absolutely necessary, and often consider the language of origin to by far be the best representation of the original work. Mostly children-based films are translated, and even they are usually shown in a parallel, English version (Thank god for that, couldn't have watched Madagascar in any other case). The nay-sayers - i.e., those who believe that translations is literary heresy - argue that since the wording is completely replaced by that of the translator, the entire literary style of the author is lost in the process. However, most counter-argue that it's a very shallow thing to say; books are not merely the words that their pages contain. And then again, the entire profession of the translator is to transcribe a work as accurately as possible, using as close translations as possible.

Personally, I'm unsure. I believe that if I were to write something that called for translation between the two languages I speak, I would most probably do it by myself. However, what harries my mind at this point is very much the fact that when I write, the words that appear before me are really to me only suited in the language that I write them in. I think that were I to translate a piece of my own, I could impossibly work out of the original text - I would have to rewrite the same story in another language. Inaccuracies would definitely occur by that approach.

Then again, whenever I read something and I can actually speak the language of the original author, I will always prefer the original language. Why? I don't know. It's some vague belief that it is actually better, but I know of few cases where it's affirmedly so. Terry Pratchett is an excellent example of translations gone wrong - while certainly still an enjoyable book, the Swedish version is nowhere near as funny as Pratchett's originals. Then again, Swedish is a stale language in many ways, and you do have to spend a lot of time and be very creative in order to bend it right. English just falls so... right, somehow. Maybe it's a Swedish thing, or a non-English thing. Or maybe you true native speakers feel so as well? How about French, for instance? I only know a teeny bit of French. Je voudrais croissant, and so on. Voila mon passporte. Does it... Does it grant the same kind of literary satisfaction when writing or speaking it? Do the words come out like a pretty little stream by the side of a pretty little garden? They sure do not in Swedish, most of the time.

Anyway. Perhaps a translator would do a better job of rendering the actual piece in another language. The text, the words that I use would probably be better substituted by a professional, rather than by me. However, again, the written is not merely words. Could a translator - especially in metaphorical texts - truly translate the idea, the discourse itself? Would an author do that better?

At some point, when the daydream of me being exorbitantly rich and wealthy comes true (curse my mind for making that up. Now it'll never happen), I'll hire a translator to vainly translate my own text simultaneously as I do. In the same sense, I'm dreadfully interested to see if anyone's ever done anything like that. In a world as global as today's, isn't the entire issue - or non-issue, perhaps - of translation even more interesting?

A Quote

"That's art. Where someone can whisk you off your feet and take you away to a different world, and let you witness their reality, their perspective." - PureRage

I promise I'll dig more into this quote and actually use it some day, instead of just blindly throwing it out there as a substitute for writing a real post. But hey, tomorrow's post... I just polished the last bit. It's kind of big. It's good, too. Or at least I think so.

Maybe I'll just use this space to write some generic stuff. So I was looking into the Google Analytics stuff I was running on the site, and I was kinda disappointed at all the generic traffic I was getting. So, yeah, sure, I wasn't expecting hordes of readers, but then again, I wouldn't have minded one or another. But what I found was like... several visits a day, but all "empty" ones. Visit time 00:00:00. I reckoned at first, bloody hell, SO many bots. Then I googled it, and found out that bots indeed never showed up in Google Analytics, and since I reckoned that Google, if any, were awesome at finding out what was bots and what wasn't, they could probably exclude that minority rather easily. So I was confounded. What the bloody hell were these three million no-time visits?

As I found out, when I googled this five minutes ago, blogs and other like one-page sites show up like that. All of those visitors were genuine, but they showed up faulty in the analytics. It gave me a warm feeling for a few seconds, until I realized a few dozen people had already read everything I'd written, then bounced off immediately. Shit. Is it that bad? And then again, two dozen people. Is it that good? Surely not?

This is probably the first post on this blog that's published directly after writing, by the way. The others were always scheduled a couple of days in advance, and many of them thought of and drafted nearly a week before showing up on the blog. I don't know if it works that well. I was hoping it would make the posts a bit more thought-out and planned, as I have had some time to edit and polish them before they were published, while still allowing for a steady stream of posts. I'm not sure if it worked though, since I notice a lot of silly mistakes (like one post referring to something I said tomorrow, and stuff like that).

Anyway. Shit. I didn't think I'd go on like that. Sorry. Normal shit will hit fans tomorrow, as usual.

Oh, and also. I'm going to fiddle around with this layout template soon. Maybe smack some nice photos or artwork into it or something. Scope deviantart and see if there's something tiny I could put in somewhere. It looks too plain as it is, right.

Of Plans

I got stuck.

I was writing on this new thing, and after a while, I just found that I was stuck. I couldn't write any more. I didn't know where to go, what to do, what to write. How was this story going to go on? Whatever transition I could think of would be long and winding and I had created myself a minor point of no return; suddenly I had a situation where I had to kill my darlings, as "darlings" represent about 500 words and my entire story so far.

 

So I decided to just erase the document and start over. I realized that some of the blog posts I had posted on the subject had more in-depth information on the storyline than my synopsis did. That needed fixing. When I start referring to a blog post to see how my characters would react, then something somewhere is obviously toppled.

And it makes me wonder just how much forward planning, just how much pencilling and drawing you have to do to get a decent result. I've always thought that I wanted to reserve a great deal to the process of writing. It was my idea of leaving some joy in the writing. Synopses and storylines have always meant to me a great aid, but not to the point where the aid is more important than the cause. I realize, however, that what story I will produce will be a haphazard jumble of half-hearted ideas.

 

But in a short story like this - I doubt it will exceed more than perhaps 3,000 words, whereas many standard texts go to about five or six thousand - do I really need a wealth of characters? The main protagonist, the Ghost, will mostly be a rather empty shell, but I still need to grant him a motive, a final objective to strive for. Why is he doing what he is doing? Without that final goal in sight, all of his conversations will be dull and uninteresting, since they will just exist for the sole purpose of being there.

In the same sense, the other characters need ideas, need beliefs and dilemmas. Otherwise, why would they ever go on? I cannot portray an empty shell, because an empty shell would do very little - and especially so as I am rather bad at portraying characters in the first place. It's quite possible that these objectives, these layers of personality that I plan in my mind never will be revealed to the reader. They might exist solely in an obscure perspective, solely in my perspective. 

Of Characters

As I scan about for things to read and stuff to learn, I felt compelled to click the little link advertising "Sara's 10 Basic Writing Tips"(via AW forums). Most likely, like many tips, they're half-useful, yet always appreciated, of course. This one, however, I couldn't resist keeping my eyes on a certain line.

things like, "James is going to kill his brother in the next scene. Be sure to leave the knife on the buffett," or “John wants to kiss Ellen. Make sure they get some alone time.”

And suddenly I realized what was so fascinating about the whole character thingie. I was writing my synopsis, like I said I would, and worked on really fleshing out the characters portrayed in the story (in retrospect, I didn't manage that well, and decided in the end to cut off two out of four). After discussing some minor issues in my head over and over, I found that the least I had to do was to quite simply flesh out some motives, and plant some basic ideas in their heads to propel the discussion I was building. And then again, I never thought these characters would serve more than empty shells to keep two sides of an argument running.

Yet when I was authoring my outline, and thinking about the application of different concepts into the story itself, I found it impossible to not at least work a bit into the different characters. I've only three or four as of yet, but I would've had no idea where to go with the story had I not the varying motives of the characters (I'm still quite uncertain, actually). 

So even as I write this story, the outline of the next is vaguely forming in my head. It's a suspenseful, minimalistic, character-heavy short story, that's vaguely written around - lo and behold - a political discussion this time around. Again, I doubt the result is going to be that fantastic, judging from my previous texts, but at least I recognize the fact that I am getting my head around the entire issue. It's getting quite interesting.

Of Writ to Writ

When I initially started the blog, I thought it was going to be my reflections and ideas. Disabling comments felt natural from that perspective, as well as a few other concepts that I implemented into the first posts. As I go along, however, I realize that it's not in any way a good thing to be doing.

First of all, the entire goal of the blog for me was to learn. To develop as a writer and perhaps produce a few pieces that I can look back upon and be proud of. In that sense, I felt I required more self-reflection upon both my own performance, and the style of writing that I was using. I'm sure, that if one reads previous posts, this idea is clearly noted and nearly all of them are based on a pretext of my own writing, with a higher grade of general reflection on top. This was the style and concept I intended and it's worked for me thus far.

However, I realize that the texts I'm writing for the blog might have a rather slim potential audience - made even more slim if it's naught but a static webpage. Some casual discussion, once again on the AbsoluteWrite forums, introduced that sentiment and as I think about it, it makes more and more sense. I also viewed a quick article from About.com's section on blogging, which seemed to concur with the idea.

Obviously, I have a long way to go. No only as to how I write and how I find and take feedback and criticism, but also how I consider this blog as a tool. I think I've at least had a few valuable ideas that I started up with, but it's dreadfully obvious I need a few more of those.

As such, my new intention is to try and recieve more ideas, more feedback, and more criticism from everywhere I go. I thought at first learning on my own would be the most interesting experience, but I realize that allowing myself to heed the advice of others won't make me less original and independent. Instead, I find that patching every piece of wisdom and advice together, in conjunction with my own experience and idealism, creates a very unique and well-rounded style of one's own.

Either way, I've edited in a few question marks into previous posts, questions that really ought to be asked in the first place but does not appear so obvious if you're but the reader. Like the submorals and undertexts that featured in some of my writing, there's a lot under the lines of the average blog post.

Again, I excuse some of my arrogance. I feel it's nagging me harder than ever. I'll try desperately to repel it.

?

Of Sesquipedality

A thread I want to pick up from an earlier post is regarding the use of, let us say, "fancy words". I've been thinking about it lately, especially when comparing my latest text to my earlier one, and noticing the huge difference in style imposed by the mere fact that I cut off quite a bit of the pretty words in the dialogue.

And, to be quite honest, using long and complex words in excess is a negative thing. To me, it makes it seem like the writer isn't entirely in touch with his language, to the point where he/she feels that it is necessary to use these excessive words in order to express oneself properly. Usually, however, it has nothing with eloquency to do, at least when we're talking amateur writers. Then it's more a case of wishing it to sound more expressful, more vivid and descriptive.

This usually fails. In my experience, overuse of words mean nothing. It's the underlying story, the characters, the moral and the ideas of the writer that mean something. When you have a cloud of excessive words hindering access to this core concept, this means you have failed.

Look at Coelho for instance. His writing style is littered with the use of rather mundane and simple words, yet his stories are vivid, interesting, damn near legendary.

As I investigate the matter a bit online, it appears to me that a great number of classical authors have actually written in a very minimalistic style. Just to what extent they were referring at the moment, I am unsure; but I suspect I will require a field day at the City Library at some point. However, the users discussing the matter seemed rather unanimous on the point that it was indeed rather dull to read a work of that kind of simplistic manner. Again, this might just be the literary equivalent of Black Square, and that is not at all what I'd be aiming for. 

Either way, I'm trying to restrict my use of excessive and unnecessary adverbs, adjectives and in some cases verbs that just doesn't fit in with the situation at hand. Adverbs and adjective should be used to enhance your mental image, the description of whatever you're describing, not enhancing the text itself. And I suspect that's where I, and most with me, go wrong. So the next thing I write, after this whole Limbo thing (I've realized I might just call it "Mind at Rest", instead), is going to be gritty, grey, and plain.

What does overuse of words mean, anyway? This question is what I intend to look into. "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put", Winston Churchill once said. While it's certainly a point, that the overuse of archaic and stylistic English usually results in plain mockery of the language, I think it applies scarcely. 

Of Contrast

As I again casually write a bit on the new short story - the very first draft, of course - I realize that this is going to appear so much more mundane than Raison d'Être. I think there are a few factors for this.

First of all, I am slightly afraid of making it just too heavy on the sesquipedalian attributes, to make it appear preposterous and presumptive. It's a complex kind of hubris where you, in your intention of clarifying your meaning, might well already have been misunderstood or quite simply used the wrong word at the wrong place. Where the chase for this eloquency might fall short and end up in the ditch.

Second, of course, I'm building this story with a lot more dialogue. Well, any dialogue would be a lot more than Raison d'Être, of course, but this will be almost solely based on dialogue. Whereas Raison d'Être focused a lot of the message through the appearance and behaviours of protagonist and environmen, thus calling for a lot of descriptive text, for a lot of in-depth detail; this new one - I might call it "Limbo", since it effectively describes the issue of the main protagonist (but then again, I think "limbo" is a rather ugly word) - will be so based on the dialogue and the ideas and beliefs of the main characters, where the Ghost, the protagonist, is pondering over death as a personal issue.

And with less dialogue and more descriptive text, the entire thing appears more archaic, more in tune with ancient legends and stories.

Third, this dialogue is built up with main characters that I wanted to appear correct. These characters represent ideas of death as they are already, or as I belive that they would be divided - those directly denying the possibility of death, and thus very crestfallen and distressed if it does happen; those believing, in some sense, in "a better place", and those quite finally that grapples with the distress of death and are still unsure. That becomes a comfortable platform from which to work. Each character can bring their idea into the discussion and the Ghost - defined as the central, philosophical discussion, the one that carries the idea forward - agrees or counters as I, myself, see fit. In this sense, I also want these characters to appear like real people. Although I'm not very good at it, it's nonetheless a worthwhile attempt to depict life-life characters. In this sense, they won't be conversing in the same archaic and academical style that I grant the Ghost - seeing as he represents the philosophers, those distanciated, in a sense, with the conflict itself, but yet right there (and this point will be duly expressed as well) - but they will be talking with very much more common expressions and words. Such that I myself would use in casual conversation (needless to say, more thought goes into my writing than in my casual conversation).

 

So the final result will probably much express the division between the Ghost and the other main characters, and it's a division I want to accentuate. As much as the Ghost is a part of them, it's still distant and divided, as much as this whole idea of death is a very distant and odd thing to think about.

The question thus becomes, where lies the border between mundanity, and overcomplexity? Dialogue as a tool to create emotion can inspire an academic presence as well as a gritty, more low-brow style. Both of whom, of course, can easily be utilized for the ends of the text. If there's any further opinion, I'd like to hear it.

Of Education

I was leafing through the criteria of the current course in Swedish and noticed a rather funny-looking goal. "Pupils use literary handbooks when necessary". ("Literary", in this case, is a bad translation, since "språkliga" was a tad bit difficult to get right) I expect they were referring to thesauruses, dictionaries, and grammar books. Not that odd, perhaps, but it struck a thought to me.

 

Why would someone, who has spoken a language since birth, require a "literary handbook"? Language is an intuitive thing, as can be seen when toddlers learn language without even thinking about it. One day they just go "Mum", or "Dad", or "Caw" or whatever they might say. Now if you think about it, these kids have been making guttural noise ever since their vocal chords were fully developed, yet one doesn't consider it language until they actually speak intelligibly. 
Our languages are all structured with abstract rules and very obscure ideas. When you learn it properly, these things tend to come naturally. In your native language, you never even think of the order words come in, or what tense they are, or how they change depending on person or whatever. It's just there, it's always been there, and it's always understood.

Now I realize that I've read a whoole lot of books in my life - at least relatively to others of my age, who rarely even touch a book like it were the plague. Grammar and vocabulary comes even easier when you've worked with a language that's written. A language, something as fluent, as variable and as dynamic as a language, surely cannot be learnt by rules, stiff from ages of discussion and compromise. I mean, sure, I agree that certain rules are obviously just... You can't write that your silly. My silly what? It's not a bombshelter, it's a bomb shelter. Etcetera. But when we get into the most intricate and complex of rules, these are the kind of things that don't exist in reality. You do not consider the tense, the very most deep grammar of your text? Is that the way you learnt to speak your language fluently?

Personally, it is not. And I fail to understand why we think that language is best taught the way that it is so rarely taught "for real".

Of Polyester

I was starting to write on that new short story I was thinking about just the other day. I thought I should seriously get started with writing a bit, maybe even have a few parallel works at the same time that I can fiddle with. While I had already begun a little - as in the dialogue that I published last week - I never intended that to be a serious part of the story, more than a style guideline.

So, anyway, I was typing this thing, getting along quite fine, and I struck upon a couple of poetic sentences. Now, I intended this short story from the very start to be less of a moral - as in Raison d'Être, which you of course haven't read, but that doesn't matter - and be more of a discussion, just as much to myself as to the world at large. Now, course, that's the kink, I don't expect very many people to ever read this thing, which is why I can direct it more to me than to anybody else.

However, I found myself writing a whole load of garbage, actually. In order to tie the entire thing together, I gently placed a few sentences here and there, sprinkled them in between the lines; and suddenly, upon reading what I just wrote a bit, I found a line of garbage. Look at this, for instance

"There will always be stillness. Either in the mind, or outside of it. Never are the two combined. Perhaps these calm places, these quiet, white, silent places, are made solely to inspire chaos of mind."

Now when I read this, I just said to myself outright, what the bloody hell is that? Where did that come from? I must have straight grabbed it out of thin air as I was typing along. I mean, it's not a bad sentence per se, but I can't have that in there. It's not like it's something I believe, something I think or thought of outside of writing this particular piece.

I can't write things that I do not agree with, or believe. That is outright wrong. I can do it to a certain extent when it comes to trivial things, of course, or when I'm depicting someone else. But I cannot write a text, from my own mind, with blatant deviations from this pattern of thought.

Whether or not I will omit these lines is still something I'm considering. I am still pondering their meaning for the story as a whole. I have so far casually referred to this concept later on in the text, and whether this will actually mean something for the story is yet to be seen. I see this short story, again, as a discussion, not a definite article - as such, it's an open script, a tabula rasa. Whatever I write is not necessarily truth, but it can very well be a valuable addition to the final product. As such I am still discussing, still conferring, with myself on what I mean to say. What I mean to transmit, to convey. Until that is settled, I know nothing.

Of Writ of Writ

About a week has gone since I published the first, introductory post and posted links here on a few websites. This is the sixth or seventh post that is published, and I have a few more that are still being drafted.

I aim to post one post every day, excepting Sundays and Saturdays. I set the posts to publish at 12:00, through Bloggers own clock which is most likely somewhere in the United States. That's 20:00 GMT. Usually, I will write these posts a couple of days in advance and throw them into the publishing queue. At present time of writing, this post won't be published until four days on. And the post for tomorrow is the one I wrote this morning. This way, few mistakes will survive, and I get a chance to edit and re-edit my posts without slowing down the rate of publishing. I have been pondering this quite a bit, and while I realize that it might to me feel a bit plastic and fake, as I most surely will have gone on from the stage I was at by the time a relevant post has been posted, I know that I just won't handle the pressure and additional stress of keeping that momentum up. Instead, this way I know that I have posts that will be posted, and I can skip logging into Blogger for a few days without even feeling a bit guilty.

What I will write about is still largely a question on my part. I realize that at one point, I will most likely run out of inspiration. However, it's quite possible that my casual writing has proceeded to such a point when this happens, that I could fill some posts out with snippets of text and the thoughts around it. I realize now, as I file through the texts I've had others read, that some undertones aren't understood by any but the author himself. Some undertones aren't even noticed by me, but can be found through close scrutiny. I think I might just pick out a few of those lines and do a minor analysis of them, just to show to both you and me how I think sometimes.

Of course, as a learning young man, I have already come to a number of conclusions regarding writing, arts and authors in general, and I wish I had more material and reflections of other writers. I think I shall seek blogs, journals and columns of authors, journalists and writers, and reflect more out of their work. This way, I hope to develop my own sense of writing.

And when it comes to readers, I think I have just stopped caring a bit. Surely I wouldn't mind people reading this blog, and it would render me a certain satisfaction knowing that my voice does count from time to time, but in the end, I find it just as rewarding for my own sake. Certainly, I could just pick up some pen and paper and start writing for real, but I doubt the effect would be the same - on me, that is. There is a certain satisfaction, too, knowing that I keep this on the Web as a document of interest, somehow. 

As to why I disabled comments? I do not know. Perhaps I will re-enable them sometimes in the future. However, when it comes to comments, it just feels to me as so vague. To me, I think that if one seriously sought to express some opinion on what was said in the post one could just as well take the minor effort to send me a personal e-mail; otherwise, it might well fall into that category of minor critique that I so far have recieved from most else. In the same sense, I will most likely take the effort to answer, as well.

A Dialogue

"What is death, anyway," said the Ghost. "What is alive, and what is not?"

"I... I have no idea what you're talking about," said the Father.

The Ghost sat down on the armrest of a nearby chair and eyed the Father, affectionately yet distant.

"Consider this. These people," the Ghost gestured vaguely towards the milling folks of the corridor, "are they alive to you?"

"Of... of course they... are! They're very much... alive, breathing and walking and..."

The Father displayed a intricate show of emotions, running to and fro in his face. Anger, desperation - and downright bereavement.

"No, I mean... Not if they breathe, not if they walk... But is there life?"

"What more is there to life, than... walking and talking?"

The Ghost smiled briefly.

"Listen to yourself. Is life not more than the mere animation of your body? Does that make a puppet, in the hands of a puppeteer, a living being? Does a car, or a train, live? They breathe and walk and talk, in their own way. Yet are they alive?"

The Father said nothing, stared gloomily into the flickering, ethereal face of the Ghost.

The Ghost stood up, walked casually until he stood with his nose bare inches from the Father's eyebrows.

"Am I alive to you? I, a ghost of the future, a vision of the past of the moment? Think, man. Think... dad."

The Father looked up, and recognition flashed in his face, lit his soul with emotion. The gloom retreated, and he opened his mouth to speak. But the shape of the Ghost was gone - not more than a reflection, a burning image on the retina. The Father looked down, shook his head, and cried a little.

This is a piece I wrote just over five minutes the other day. I use it as a bit of a style guide to the rest of the story, or at least that's what I think it is. I did this partly because I was aching to get started a little on this short story, and partly because I wanted to figure out a couple of kinks in my synopsis. I think I've got most of it cleared out by now, so I should be able to finish the synopsis fairly soon.

Of Tutors

I sit here with a reviewed copy of Raison d'Être in my hand.

Apparently, it fulfills all criteria for this assignment and even one more beyond that.

"Very well done. You're really talented at writing. I really like both style and content."

I would have liked some real feedback. Again, I suppose that the only learning that really happens is on your own. They've given me an opportunity to do some peer editing but in all instances it was very unrewarding. I did my best to both compliment and to give proper, constructive criticism; however, what I received was either compliment lacking constructivity, or just a vague neutrum, lacking all kinds of point.

There's an affliction worse than writer's block, at least to me. It's that time when you read through your latest draft and you just keep thinking, "Shit, this needs a rewrite". While it certainly isn't wrong to go over and rewrite bits of a draft, it's dangerous when you start looking over your text and decide that it's just not good enough. That's the time when you ruthlessly polish until it's nothing but gleam, or just tear apart every page in a rage.

You see, I like my texts to be a little bit crude. Too polished, too thought through, will just make it seem artificial and strange. Of course, the other end of the spectrum is horrible as well - when you just mindlessly write without either forethought or editing. Perhaps that makes sense when you're writing things, where the entire purpose is to just let your mind rip - like certain parts of this blog - but if you're looking to seriously produce some kind of quality, you need to make sure that your text is just right in that blessed middle.

Of Death

I have thought of a story.

I have written very little of it yet - actually, nothing but scrambled thoughts about the short story, and a snippet of text intended as a trial, a test run of the ideas and characters(see "dialogue" as of 7th Nov).

However, it's starting to very much take shape in my head.

It revolves around death. Alike Raison d'Être, it's like a philosophical discussion, nigh a monologue, disguised as the trials and tribulations of an unnamed character.

It's a good platform, I think. Obviously, writing a clear-headed philosophical article is not by far as interesting. Partly, writing is still, in my eyes, an art. Properly picking your sentences, your ideas, your characters, and shaping a text out of them - it's like drawing a picture, shuffling through the elements in your head to see which piece fits the puzzle. And at the same time, if I were to do nothing but express my own thoughts in an article, it would leave little to your own imagination. This delicate balance of telling you my mind, and using your mind, is what constitutes the art of writing.

Art, in my eyes, is the craft of provoking thought. Whenever you provoke thought, whenever you awake that dormant beast of imagination and idealization that slumbers within every one of us, that is art. (Part of this is why I consider certain pieces of rap, hip hop, and popular music to be art, rather than music - they provoke thought, in a sense, but lack all kinds of rhythm that constitute a piece of music)

When you read this entry in my log, do you reflect upon it as your own? Do you apply my principles, my ideas, my experiences, as I describe them, onto yourselves? I would not. In fact, when I read an article, or a blog entry, or any piece of non-fictional text, I add that to my little bank of knowledge, as another reference to cite in my brain, another aid for my train of thought. However, when I read a poetic lyric, or a philosophical short story - that applies to my own behaviour. That goes to the heart rather than the mind. Just as a painting can strike fear, or a sculpture inspire honour, all art aims, or should aim, for the heart. 

Do not get me wrong. As I refer casually to the heart, I mean not your primal centre of emotion and instinct, I mean those thoughts that strike you, as a person, rather than you as a member of the community. A work of art strives to embetter you, as a work of nonfiction strives to embetter mankind. Wherein lies the difference between you as a communal being, and you as a person? Well, take this blog for instance. I do not wash my emotions - and the teenage hail of emotion is quite overwhelming at times, I'll tell you - but I write of my thoughts. My thoughts of emotion is stored in a wholly separate document, which I keep to myself and myself only. They are for my own personal reflection. This, however, I intend as a reflection upon anyone who reads; this is a text shaped by the communal self. (I'm sorry, that section became really strange. I can't properly entertain this notion, but neither will it make sense to omit it. I hope your imagination and common sense will fill in the rest. Otherwise, we should have a chat sometime, just to see if we can clear this thing out)

Of course, works of longer fiction are harder. They tend to have a less obvious moral, yet they tend to mean something in the long run. While certain works are for nothing but distraught entertainment - not a bad thing, as such, in fact I am an avid reader of books that really are quite meaningless - others strike out for the heart, once again.

Only sometimes they puncture a lung.

Of Life

I have written a small piece.

It's awfully unpolished.

Not only that, it's in Swedish.

Fact is, I am slightly ashamed. It's not a real short story. It's, in fact, a school assignment.

I suppose you can see where this is going?

Now, don't get me wrong. I have always spent a lot of time and devotion to everything I do for educational purposes (at least, that is, if I believe in the importance of the assigment... which I usually do). Yet, fact is, that school assignments are typically pieces restricted by guidelines, by a rather short deadline, and by the mere fact that - gasp! - I'm a student.

While it is certainly true that we had a very loose leash on this one - "Write a short story, folks!" - and the deadline wasn't too bad, this whole school assignment thing gives off bad vibes.

And fact is, as I eye the text I wrote a few weeks ago, through five drafts and a little bit of external influence, I just swipe my screen with my finger and say to myself, "This. This I need to rewrite."

It's like that little snippet of text that appeared in my head during a rather dull train journey a few years back - "My notebook became my finest critic, for everything I wrote was disgusting."

Anyway, so this text. I called it "Raison d'Être" - excuse the French - "a reason to live", to put it bluntly. I'm not sure whether it was such a fitting title, but it sounds awfully nice, doesn't it? The story was a deeply metaphorical one - a genre I prefer, by far, at least in short stories - revolving around a young writer and his troubles.

While I certainly, in my eyes, did a decent job, I'm not satisfied by far. How could I be? The introduction was a shambles, a last-minute addition where the original paragraph simply did not fit in with the rest of the story. The story fluctuates between a very, extremely metaphorical perspective, and a far more concrete view. The change in the protagonist, nigh the entire idea and moral of the story, is lost in lacking emphasization.

Oh, and the "moral" of the story. This is the foremost eyesore. What am I trying to say? A short story without a point, without a driving idea, is nothing more than a fictitious article. Yet how could a young man, a student even, reflect upon life when he has had very little? How could I wish to convey wisdom, when it is unto me that wisdom shall be conveyed? Surely, whatever I write, whatever I say, is nothing but a mere reply, a copy of what has already been said? What tidbit, what advice I give is naught but the advice I have recieved myself, given unto me by someone who himself has attained experience. It's like an Amazon, forever living with naught but females, writing about relations with men, or Darwin writing his evolutionary thesis without looking unto small birds on distant islands. It's a scientist without his evidence, a journalist without his news - an author lacking a pen.

It strikes me that I lack a pen.

Of an Introduction

Where to start?

I suppose the best place to start is at the very core of the project, the blog, the written - myself.

So I shall introduce myself briefly. I am a young Swede, or rather, I suppose, a dual national. I had the fortune to be born to two academic parents of differing origin - one Swede, and one Englishman. This led to me being a rather well-educated young man with a talent for the English language as well as the Swedish. Or so I like to believe. Whether this statement holds true or not is, I suppose, up to the readers to decide.

I am, in short, a writer. While still very much a student, and also quite a dizzying array of other things, be it a gamer, a nerd, a geek, a cynic, an atheist, a bitter, grumpy, boring fuck, to name a few - I am, in essence, a writer. That is my one prominent talent and that is my one favourite occupation. I find joy in writing, in thinking of what I write, what I wrote and what I will write, and I find that even my most unpolished works can be rather perfect in themselves. Writing is what I aspire to do for a living, and writing is, in one way or another, most likely what I will be doing (moreso, then, the fact that I'm hardly skilled at anything else, and that the merits I have, or will have once I'm finished studying, denies the possibility of flipping burgers).

What has led me to write this post?

Allow me to explain the purpose of this blog. 

I am a slightly depressed young man. Saddened by the position that I find myself in, I realized that I had to take my mind off of things. Constantly dwelling on what makes you miserable gets you nowhere - it's like forever picking at your fresh wound, partly giving you great pain and partly never allowing it to heal, in fact even making it worse. I will not go into much detail just what it is that makes me despair, since I am not even sure myself - but I can say that it feels like trying to wear a sock for a glove. It doesn't fit, it doesn't allow you to grip other things properly, and first and foremost, you have that eerie feeling that the two were never meant to come together.

After a long while, merely daydreaming, thinking, idealizing, I decided that I should start to make things better. First of all, I needed something else to do. After a brief stint of writing, an idea grew in my mind, and I found that I wanted to once more take up writing. I have not written much for a while, and periods of inactivity always haunt me. Yet I find that every time I pick up the pen once again, I feel rejuvinated - not only does my mind, my soul, the very essence of myself feel like it's been added to, that a gap has been filled, but the very text, the pencilled sequence of words and meanings, they get better every time.

I decided that I shall write. Not only shall I write but I shall write of the writing. writ word of writ word. Writ of writ, wit of wit, writ of wit and wit of writ.

That is what I hope to do. That is the purpose of this blog.