writing

i just finished writing a short story for a competition. all i can say is: writing a story is bloody hard work. it's probably the hardest thing i've ever had to do: harder that all the job interviews and job applications that i didn't give a toss about and harder that my dissertation at university which was 4 times longer but which i also didn't give a toss about.

you start with an idea and this idea has about a million possibilities. you start off playing god and you rule over the lives of this people that you have created and this world you have created that anything can happen. it's the twilight zone except you are responsible for it and other people can look and it and make their cold cutting judgments.

this idea quickly dries up and you find it's actually really limited. your imagination (and your brain) is not like the universe and expanding into infinity. it stopped expanding ages ago and if anything is shrinking (yes, i will have another beer thanks.) you start to consider if a real person would act like this and why would they act like this and why doesn't he or she do this or that instead. the world you create is also crushed with the weight of realism (or at least believability.) things start to have geography and tangible effects and you realise that you are no longer god, but trapped in this self made eden with walls and trees and biting snakes. and adam and eve are not only misbehaving, they are actively taking a dump in the fish pond you took so long sculpting.

so you have to clean up the mess and this takes a long long time. you sweep and scrub and wash and hose and polish but you can never get the original stain of that sully idea out. so you dress it up and strip it down and go round and round until you can't tell the turd from the trees. and as you walk, lost, everything looks the same and you start repeating yourself and everything looks the same and you start repeating yourself (and you also start telling crap jokes and start worrying about every word in every sentence and then you know that blogging is in fact a cinch because you can write absolutely outrageously long and convoluted sentences and put them in bracket and feel that this is totally acceptable in writing because it's only a random blog afloat in cyberspace.).

and after all this you have to abandon the damn thing because there is a deadline and we must all meet our deadlines or else it won't be accepted. you'd think that i'd be happy to finally give it up, to finally finish it (in the crudest sense of the word finish) and i thought i would be happy to finish it too, but godamn it, it's mine and it's filled with more than my blood, sweat and tears. and i cradle it in my hands, and as look at it, my heart soars.