Side effects may include constantly stumbling over your own words

I’ve compiled a lot of meaningless stories over the years. Every now and again I return to my notebooks—the archival training grounds of my writing practice. I’m often frustrated at myself for routinely neglecting to log a date and location on pages that later capture my attention. The other day I ventured back into the trafficked pages of my first moleskin in search of inspiration and reassurance in my possessing at least some authorial competence or, dare I say, finesse. Skimming through my old notebooks when I’m struggling to write always ends up feeling like some strange epistolary correspondence with my younger self. The act alone of seeking inspiration and even wisdom from my former self is both intimate and humiliating. In and amongst the absolute banality of most of my writing appear some entries which surprise me and make me smile. I recently came across one such page which exercises a keen erudition I didn’t think I possessed and, after having read it a couple times now, I still can’t say how I came up with it. Having deduced that I wrote the page to support a creative writing assignment for uni, I can better appreciate its substance. I couldn’t have predicted that years later, these passages would help revive me after hitting a stupor in my writing streak.

The page is titled: Side effects may include constantly stumbling over your own words and it goes as follows,

Her perfume is running out. Martha is burning out and detached. She knows this isn’t the end of the world but sometimes she likes to pretend it is. She feeds on the melodrama. The women protagonists in her novels are often isolated beings with no female friendships of their own. These protagonists enter into relationships with older men and dwell in their own melancholy. Sometimes Martha sees herself reflected on the page and at times she is self-aware enough to recognise that she is painting herself onto the page. But Martha has only ever been in love with Marlon. Marlon is the same age as Martha, if not two months her senior. On these grounds, he cannot be considered an older man. While this may be true, Martha remains an isolated woman and her love for Marlon is unrequited and, although she would never admit to it, Martha likes it this way. Because were it not for the unrequited love of her best friend Martha would have no melancholy in which to dwell.

When sentences come to a natural end, I feel that it is no longer in my power to revise or upend. When the story comes to a close, it shouldn’t feel cold, alone or unfinished. It can be mysterious and inconclusive but what is at stake must be certain. You want to leave the audience feeling something more exalted than their own humanity. When the story’s couple finally meet on that cornerstone, have them hug or kiss or better yet have them sit in silence; the weight of their wildly different worlds on their separate soldiers (*shoulders). This is the nature of pictures captured on the page. The pen that splinters, the ink that spills. Let today’s troubles be written down because they may be the fire for tomorrow’s triumphs. One day soon the story of Martha and her unrequited love for Marlon or another couple with a similar story will choreograph meaning and allude an understanding of what it means to live. One day soon, stories will fuel your life and you’ll view your working weeks through a pastiche of protagonists, all of whom mirror your voice. As we migrate over lined pages, we dance around the fire. Now the manifestation is clear. Whether cure or curse, the world needs words to wish upon, to wound, to weigh upon or worse.

In a previous blog post I talked about the importance of free writing. This is the unexpected fruit of that labour. It’s not much but it spoke to me when I needed it most. Without realising it I was writing about that feeling you get when you watch or read something that puts you on a higher plane of existence; a feeling of gaining perception and widening your view on life and what it means to live. I spent Saturday night sipping wine with a friend and a few glasses in we got talking about exactly this feeling. What were films, series, poems, and songs that conjured up a spontaneous and deep reveration for life and love in all its complexity?

Without according this passage too much weight, because I know I wrote it with little stimulus and no deliberate scheme, I still want to emphasise the import it holds for me today. The sensation evoked being that I seem to have known more then than I do now. At the very least, I perceive a semblance of originality and sagacity that I lack today. What happened to make me so reticent in recent years? Why can I no longer sit through French arthouse films? Has my attention span really become so stunted as to sanction a stalemate in me; an emotional impasse hindering any real development in my writing and a general aversion to introspection and the self-expression it allows? When did self-betrayal become a routine occurrence? In a world of excesses, why am I so starved of inspiration and allergic to silence? Perhaps these are all questions deserving of their own blog post or perhaps, and more likely, I will procrastinate ever facing them head on. I know the over-arching issue at the centre of all of them is capitalism and the mindless consumption on which it thrives, nonetheless this can’t be the only contemporary diagnosis for a dull life and a depleting sense of creative urgency. I must issue the prescriptions myself and sit with the discomfort of new decisions.

Sometimes it isn’t the content of my free-writing that’s telling but the spelling mistakes. In one sentence I write: “the weight of their wildly different worlds on their separate soldiers.” My intention here was obviously to write shoulders but in a funny Freudian slip of a sentence I wrote soldiers instead. Are we all just soldiers standing sentinel while time marches on? Ceaseless and unforgiving?

Towards the end of the passage it feels like I was speaking to my older self, already envisioning a life as a writer, attempting to manifest it. Not only that, my past self is also speaking to the previous passage and assuming the character of Martha as herself. Blurring my own lines of fiction and reality all under the umbrella of ambition. The philosophy behind my free-writing practice has always been that you must write until you surprise yourself. In the title I acknowledge that there will always be difficulty. I will continue stumbling over my own words but since the compensation prize amounts to surprises like this one— that’s a side effect I’m more than willing to surrender to.