Dumb Paragraph that was Supposed to be Five Paragraphs.

Discussion in 'Word Mechanics' started by waitingforzion, Sep 26, 2017.

  1. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    Your mind is setting up another roadblock. You can write about anything.

    Again, I "just write"

    My cellphone is sitting on my desk. It's wrapped up in one of those really hard cases, because I have a tendency to drop it, at least once a week, and without a hard case I'd have replaced it several times by now. It's a lime-green case, because that way I can find it.

    It's sort of unfortunate that an iPhone needs a case--they do all that lovely design work to make a slim shiny beautiful thing, and then to keep it beautiful (and functional) you have to wrap it up in less-pretty. Is there a way to make the pretty thing also less fragile? Apple’s the design folks; surely they should be doing that.

    Next to the phone is a bag of Maracaibo Creole 49% chocolate. It’s intended, I think, for cooking—it comes in those little flat round disks that make for fast melting. But we just eat the stuff straight, and we call it “kibble”, as in, “Is Cacao open? We’re out of kibble.” When I, someday, stop drinking Coke, I’m going to have to give up kibble next.

    My water bottle is next to that. It’s here so that I’ll carry it off and fill it with nice healthy water rather than opening a Coke. It’s a nice goal. A pretty bottle. It comes in very handy when I go to the airport and hesitate to spend $4.95 on a beverage. But there’s no point in it sitting on my desk, because I’m not going to use it there.

    There’s a bottle opener next to it, for more glass Coke. That’s much more likely to get used. We have a lot of bottle openers; they’re one of the things for which we follow the “hammer principle”—for certain things, like hammers, you just keep buying more until you find that the place is sufficiently salted with them that you always find one when you need one.

    That was 323 words of sheer, unadulterated nonsense. I wrote them in just under five minutes. I wrote nonsense, I put nonsense up to be viewable by the world, right here, and I am still alive.

    All you need to do right now, to further your goal of becoming a writer, is write. Just write. Your brain is bound and determined that you're never going to write. It put up the King James thing, the cadence thing, the flow thing, the sentence and action thing, and now it's telling you that you have to have a thing to write about. You don't. This is writing practice; the product is the practice, not the words.

    You can write. So do it.
     
  2. OurJud

    OurJud Contributor Contributor

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    @waitingforzion - it sounds to me like you're not ready to write at the moment. Believe me I know what this is like and it took me a long time to accept the fact that from time to time I will simply not be able to write. The desire is there, the ability is not, and I've had to learn to accept this and break off from creative writing totally.

    Ask anyone on here who's familiar with my posting pattern and they will tell you. I will post manically while I'm writing creatively, and then simply stop, sometimes for many months at a time. When this happens it's because I'm not writing creatively, and when I lose that ability I have no desire to discuss it with others.

    This sounds like what's happening to you. I think you only have the desire to write at the moment, but for whatever reason, not the ability.

    My advice is to stop trying until the ability returns. If you know it's in there somewhere, you'll know when it's back.
     
    Last edited: Sep 27, 2017
  3. waitingforzion

    waitingforzion Banned

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    So whose advice should I take? OurJud's or ChickenFreak's?
     
  4. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    OurJud's advice assumes, I think, that you at least occasionally consent to write. But that doesn't seem to be true. As far as I can tell you've been refusing to write, except for the smallest of rare small efforts, for years.

    If you don't ever want to write, don't write. But if you do, I think that writing would be a good idea.

    OurJud's advice will be a handy addition to the roadblocks that you eagerly assemble to ensure that you never write. I suspect that right now, while you're at risk of actually writing, you will grab his advice and use it to eliminate that risk.

    But don't you ever blame him for your failure to write.
     
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  5. OurJud

    OurJud Contributor Contributor

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    Thanks @ChickenFreak, that last line was a lovely thing for you to say :)

    @waitingforzion - please do whatever feels right for you. It was maybe wrong of me to say 'my advice is...' and I perhaps should have limited the post to stress it's only how I deal with the inability to write.
     
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  6. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    [​IMG]
     
  7. Iain Aschendale

    Iain Aschendale Lying, dog-faced pony Marine Supporter Contributor

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    I'm sorry, but that is a terrible question. If you lack the ability to decide whose advice matches you and your situation the best, and try to remedy that by asking for more advice on whose advice to take, you've got issues that can't be solved online.
     
  8. Shadowfax

    Shadowfax Contributor Contributor

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    My WIP was intended to be a short story re-telling the story of a song I liked. But it took over and decided it wanted to be a different story, one that required a novel to tell. (OK, I made the decision that there was a longer story worthy of being told)

    So, take a joke, any joke (here's one I heard earlier...

    How do you spot a blind man in a nudist colony?
    It's not hard.
    ) or a song, or a Shakespearian drama, or...

    and write that up as a short story.
     
  9. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    We have a whole board called writing prompts to help with that
     
  10. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    Hence my previous post about therapy ... this goes well beyond the remit of a writers forum but when someone can't decide anything for themselves its becoming a mental health issue. (and that is intended as advice not an insult)
     
  11. waitingforzion

    waitingforzion Banned

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    I am already receiving treatment for mental health issues, but it is not the case that I can't decide anything for myself. It's just that, for some reason, when I want to write, I get a mental block. I always thought this happened because I was focusing on cadence. Now I think, having never written much freely, I have trained myself not to generate thoughts when trying to write freely.

    When I was little I was able to write much more easily. My writing then wasn't at all elegant, but it was about something. I was able to come up with ideas. Also back then I use to daydream a lot. I seemed to have lost that ability.

    I did faint and hit my head in the hospital over two years ago. I'm not sure if that had any effect on my brain.
     
    Last edited: Sep 28, 2017
  12. Shadowfax

    Shadowfax Contributor Contributor

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    Write about that
     
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  13. waitingforzion

    waitingforzion Banned

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    I know I need to just write but I prefer to write about a topic in order to produce a work with a singe theme and purpose. But the problem I am facing is this: I cannot think of a topic which I have much to say about and also desire to write about.

    It's like there are many topics and sub-topics, which I am trying to navigate from general to specific and back to general, but I cannot pick one.
     
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  14. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    I don't know if this will be any help, but here is a long list of suggestions for topics you might want to consider. Lots of people have trouble thinking up what they want to write about, which is why writing prompts exist, so don't feel like you're the only person out there with the desire to write but is indecisive about subject matter. I think you have lots of company.

    Why not take a look through the list and see if any of these topics strike a chord for you. Do any of these seem like something you could have something to say about? Don't go through the list too quickly, though, because it can be overwhelming. (Like trying to choose from a menu at a restaurant that has 12 pages to it. Yikes. I can never make up my mind in a situation like that. Everything looks good. Or nothing looks good.) Instead, take your time to think about each prompt.

    And don't feel bad if you decide to use a prompt, by the way. It doesn't matter what gets you started, as long as you are able to get started. If you write about it from your own perspective, it will be original. Good luck! :)

    http://thinkwritten.com/365-creative-writing-prompts/
     
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  15. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    ...because you're at risk of actually writing, so you need to set up another roadblock.
     
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  16. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    He could write about why he finds writing difficult (a bit meta I know) - there must be several hundred words of his in this thread which he could pull together into a start and expand from there.

    Or penguins ... its always good to write about penguins
     
  17. OurJud

    OurJud Contributor Contributor

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    Let's go back to the start of the thread. You said elsewhere that you wanted to write in a formal style. Well, congratulations, the above quote shows you've managed it.

    However, this is not how fiction is written. This is more like the writing you find in non-fiction, historical or academic stuff.

    You also admit to not reading (or even liking) fiction, because of what you call a 'conversation style'. Well, hard luck, I'm afraid, because that IS how fiction is written and until you accept this and free up your style you will make no progress.

    Everything you've told us suggests you do not like, care for, or have any real interest in fiction, so why are you pursuing it?

    Maybe you need to concentrate on either poetry, academic writings or non-fiction.
     
  18. waitingforzion

    waitingforzion Banned

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    I don't really want to elaborate on that.
    I don't think I've ever said I disliked reading fiction because of its conversational style. The reason I don't like reading fiction is that it has many words referring to physical things and actions, and I don't know the meanings of them.

    As for what I prefer to write, I already said that I don't want to write fiction right now. But I might change my mind, and I am already considering doing so.

    But as for my attempts to write non-fiction, I am struggling with two things. One is that I am finding it difficult to think of an idea. The other is that I cannot even imagine writing without editing as I go.

    But this trouble with generating ideas seems to be something that has gotten progressively worse over time. When I was younger I taught myself computer programming by creating small projects. I always had some kind of an idea of what I wanted to make. But now I am finding it difficult to even think of ideas for programming projects.

    For this reason I feel as though I am not as intelligent as I used to be. I used to be able to write essays and papers just by making up arguments without doing much research. Now I cannot even elaborate on walking.

    But this may be because I have not been using my brain to accomplish anything. I spend most of my day reading articles online and watching youtube videos. Often if an articles is too long I will stop reading it. And often if a video is too long I will stop watching it. I seem to have a short attention span.

    But about five years ago, after I had written something and posted it on a site, one of the members told me that I had what it takes to be a writer, perseverance. When I wrote that five paragraph piece, I spent somewhere from a few days to a week, writing and polishing it. That member told me that what I had written was pitch-perfect, and the few that commented on it said only good things. They said that it sounded like poetry.

    Before I wrote the first sentence, I was pacing in my room, struggling to come up with the first sentence, forcing myself. That sentence I eventually edited out. But it seemed like once I came up with that one sentence, I kept going for days until I had written five paragraphs.

    Now the reason it took me so long was because I was aiming for a poetic cadence, and, unlike these days, at that time I succeeded.

    But I have lost this piece, and I can only recall one paragraph accurately. I won't bother posting it though, as I have raised expectations too high. It's not that spectacular.

    But the point is: I used to be able to do things so much more easily. I remember that on my way to college, and on my way back, my mind would fill up with all kinds of ideas for programming projects. Even though they weren't as great as those behind software written by companies like Microsoft, I nonetheless had an abundance of ideas that excited me.

    Also, I used to work as a computer programmer at a small startup, but the company shut down because they ran out of money.

    I am not saying that I was full of ideas for fiction, but I certainly managed to get some fiction written. Before I wrote that piece I mentioned, I had written a short story, which was not considered very good. But I wrote it nonetheless, and those who read it encouraged me to keep trying. This was on a different site that is no longer online.

    But I will be honest and admit this, not too long before that, many of them were telling me I needed basic instruction in English, because I was writing incoherent nonsense, of which someone said, "That might make sense to someone who's stoned." I do consider my ability to overcome that somewhat to do with my study of the Elements of Style and probably some other writing advice. But since then I have often not adhered to the rules in that style guide. And I have better books on writing now.

    But to be completely honest, I have only written a few good things, most of them assignments for college. And even the college assignments were probably not that good, except according to the professor, who was part of a substandard English department.
     
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  19. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    In your reply to Our Jud you have written 759 words explaing why you can't write ... ergo you can .... stop making excuses and just do it
     
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  20. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    I don't think that your issue is intelligence, I think that it's perfectionism, to a degree that you absolutely refuse to do things because you might not be perfect.

    Also, you do realize, don't you, that you just wrote about 750 words about your difficulties with writing? You wrote a thing, despite all your determined efforts not to.
     
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  21. jannert

    jannert Retired Mod Supporter Contributor

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    It must be pretty discouraging to think you've had abilities in the past and are losing them, or that ideas and products used to come more easily to you than they do now. Is there some reason you can think of why this is happening? Has anything significant changed in your life? I think we all can get despondent now and again, or feel that the joy of creation just isn't there, or that our products aren't satisfying for some reason. Is that the way you feel just now?
     
  22. waitingforzion

    waitingforzion Banned

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    Yeah, but I still edited as I wrote.
     
  23. ChickenFreak

    ChickenFreak Contributor Contributor

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    Well, this time the editing didn't make it incomprehensible. So, write another thing.
     
  24. OurJud

    OurJud Contributor Contributor

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    This is one of the things you need to stop worrying about. I and [possibly] millions of other 'creative writers' edit as they write.

    You hear advice that you shouldn't do it, but so what? They're not the boss of us.
     
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  25. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    Again its fine to do, but not to the point that it becomes a procrastination tactic and 3 hours later you are still worrying about comma placement in sentence one
     

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