Boredom as Inspiration?
One thing that has always made me think that I’m not a high-class writer is the fact that I don’t seem to get writer’s block. Well, not in the same way as described by my French Lit lecturer… L’angoisse de la page blanche – the anguish of the white page. I’ve met a few people who seem to feel drawn to write, like it’s something within them that’s pulling them towards a pen and paper and torturing until they produce, create, express. That’s what it seems like from what I’ve heard anyhow.
I am writing right now primarily because I have nothing else to do. If I wanted to spin a yarn, I could say that writing is indeed my calling and that I’m simply blocked by other pressing matters most of the time. Like the consumption of chocolate post-xmas, the task of integrating myself into my boyfriend’s family and the desire to prepare myself for my duties as the director of a play. Since I’ve become director, I’ve learned that the job should actually be labelled director/producer, or unfortunate slave to art.
Writing isn’t, however, my master. My secondary reason for writing is a sort of exhibitionism, I guess. Always in the back of my mind is the knowledge that I have a blog, and the potential of said blog to share my stories, of which I do have quite a few. I almost feel guilty for not writing more frequently – so many events have been missed and may be recalled in the future among friends and/or family, or they may not be recalled at all.
I’ve discovered the brilliance and weakness of the human memory in spending more time with my sisters. Small triggers can provoke deep-buried memories to surface within one mind, but not provoke a single reaction within another. I may remember the time we got up early and went bareback pony-riding but Eric may have completely forgotten. Then something could just as easily stimulate a memory of hers that I’ve forgotten. At first, I thought I had a superb memory, because I was the one being reminded by our gossip, but when I think about it, there are a lot of stories that I have been told about myself. I’m excluding alcohol as a factor here, by the way. Some of those memories should remain forgotten.
A stubborn man once told me not to waste my time learning something because my brain only has a certain amount of storage, and I shouldn’t waste it on drivel. At the time, learning was a bit of a tax and a bit too time consuming for my liking anyhow, so it wasn’t until my first holiday from uni in about two years that I rediscovered the joy of learning. If I take my time and conscientiously read something, I can retain the information and, as a result, learn something. Result: I got my heavy traffic licence within a week of deciding to sit the test. 100%
If I ask questions about things I don’t know, or don’t understand, or think that the person I’m talking to will know more about than me; and if I pay attention to the answers, I can eventually acquire another brain’s worth of knowledge. Of course, this would take a lot longer to do in completion, but after 4 weeks working with a man about 40yrs older than me, I ran out of questions to ask because I had already asked about and absorbed all the information I was obviously missing. Unfortunately skills can’t be acquired as easily.
This insight, too, was inspired by boredom. In the absence of uni, my brain has become bored enough to be possibly more productive than when it is deliberately provided stimulation and time to learn. Other factors I haven’t mentioned include the increased amount of exercise I’ve been taking, and the increased amount of time I’ve been spending outdoors – the great outdoors, not smog-filled cities. This could also feed the brain, I suppose. Back to my original question, though: does the fact that I’m writing this because I’m bored (and guilty) discredit it’s value? Perhaps it’s of lower quality than my other writing. Or the writing I’d have done if I hadn’t been so lazy when I had a true source of inspiration. I think, in writing, subject matter will make or break you. (Does learning interest YOU?)
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)Dec 6, 2010
I guess now is as good a time as any to start writing this. I’m about to finish reading a translation of Stieg Larsson so not only do I have the time, but I have the edgy style of writing in my head, which I have subconciously started replicating in my head. In black and white it probably isn’t quite as impressive, but then again his writing is backed up by several incredibly intense stories, whereas I’m just dabbling in a bit of me and my surroundings.
I’m Bridg, 21 years old; born at around 2 in the morning late on in July of ’89. I was a week late and the third child my mum had had, as such she wasn’t anxiously awaiting me in hospital: she woke up to find me trying to escape around midnight and was driven by my dad the two hours to the hospital where I was born. She claims she had to cross her legs in the carpark to stop me slipping out.
Things have continued to be pretty interesting since then, in my opinion. I don’t particularly want to turn this into a biography so I’ll bring up relevant parts of my upbringing as they become relevant or if I run out of other things to write. At the moment key background info is that, following many complications at schools which couldn’t handle my hunger for knowledge, I became an award-winning student of French and German at the University of Otago. By award-winning, I don’t mean to say the whole world reveres me (I barely get any reverence from my own boyfriend!), I just mean people tend to give me money and trips. The trips are the relevant part. I have three sisters and we were brought up to be hard working all-rounders who are all in all quite likeable. As a result of this, I’m currently living with the boss of my summer job: travelling around the country selling whitebait at food festivals, A&P shows and the like. I think that brings us today, or rather last night, which is where my first story, in what I hope will be a collection of interesting/amusing anecdotes from my life, begins.
I’m up north on the coast, doing clean-up and other errands in preparation for the rest of the season of travel/work. For now, I think I’ll follow the trend from back in Kleist’s time where it was quite cool to only partially identify places by using the first letter of their name followed by dot dot dot. I do it for fear of stalkers/identification. People like Kleist did it because it was cool, and as writers they were the rockstars of their time. So anyhow, here in K… the population is less than 1000 and a large proportion of them are branded as hippies because that’s the closest thing to a stereotype you can give them. That or alternative. I’d just like to point out right now that I admire self-sufficient people and think they’re AOK. After spending a heck of a lot of time with just each other for company over the space of about a month, my boss and I were in need of a bit of outside company. I was, anyhow. He invited four friends over for a BBQ: two couples, who I expected to be around 50, like him, and generally old and a touch eccentric. I was concocting a plan of how to sneak away to avoid being bored to death when the first couple arrived. I was sunbathing at the time. This is how it played out.
Couple Number One and I had some awkward first moments when I walked out to meet them in my bikini. Would you call the female version of a toyboy a toygirl? I was reminded of jokes made between sisters about one day having a much-younger pool-boy to perve at. Mrs One quite blatantly looked me up and down and I rushed off to put some shorts on. Mrs One is a younger-than-expected artist with lots of tattoos and bad teeth, Mr One has slightly worse teeth and is a really nice guy who seems to have had his finger in every employment pie: working on ships, in the forest, and now presumably in K… They live in a one-room house built amongst the bush for them by the community who thought they’d lived in a tent for long enough. They know the boss through fishing and the community.
After whipping out some snacks and having a wee chat with Mr One (turns out he learned Russian on one of the ships he worked on. I was a bit too scared to talk to Mrs One after being very visually judged.), Couple Number Two arrived. Mrs Two looked like she should have been with Mr One: they both had soft, pale skin and seemed to be the “nice” half of their pair. Like Mrs One, Mr Two looked like a bit of a badass. I was on the net when he arrived and he called me a nerd. I said there are worse things I could be. Turns out he is, or used to be, a grower and consumer of pot. In fact, the whole lot of them seem to be stoner buddies, which is just fine by me – this eliminated my intial fear of a long, boring, stuffy, tedious night. Mrs Two was quite large and didn’t talk much. Mr Two had lots of cool and interesting stuff to say, but I prefered to go and play with their dog because I didn’t really understand their tales of fishing and forestry. Mrs One loves horses and is Dutch – my company is steadily getting more interesting – and Mr One is a complete gentleman, complementing my BBQ skills (then again I hid the fact that I splashed hot oil all over my arm. I have some nice dark blotches to show for it now.) and generally being a nice fella. Dinner is delicious, company amicable and eventually everyone heads home. I get an awkward side-hug from the boss (awkward on my part) before he heads off to bed.
I could write more and go into more detail, but I think a short summary is nice for now, perhaps if people become interested in what I have to say, I’ll say more. For the moment, writing screeds would somehow feel a bit arrogant so that’s all from me!
Until we meet again…
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