Day 4

I’m waiting for the video to render, some fancy term for combining two videos to one apparently. Maybe it means other things, but I’m not looking it up just yet. It’s 2 am. I wanted to upload the video tonight but I’m just too damn tired lately. I’m not sleeping well but I’m sleeping a lot. A lot of that half sleep actually where I lie there and don’t think but I don’t get rested either. That’s what I’ve been doing from about 2 till 4 this week then I’m up and checking my email. 

I tried breaking that cycle by going to the library today. I think I’ll become a regular there, which will be nice once the monkeys are back in school, but right now they’re obnoxious. It’s a library. I expected the quiet mumble, but when there are a dozen kids and their teachers and parents, well, the stereotype of the place is just thrown out. Even the kids manning the scanners were talking full volume. 

Maybe I’m just irritable but the library and anywhere with books is meant to be a sanctuary of peace and relaxation and learning. I was studying story structure. It’s one of those things that people want to call art and either you have it or you don’t, a matter of natural talent, mystic babble about the creative process, yadda, yadda, yadda, but it’s not. It’s like anything else. You have to learn the basics. 

I’ve got the basics of style down pat and experiment with them regularly. Composition is the first thing I learned. Economy, simplicity, color, freshness are the four virtues of good style. Economy: saying things in as few as words as needed. It doesn’t mean brevity, but not droning on and cutting words that don’t have purpose. 

Simplicity: writing as you would talk, not elevating your vocabulary to scholarly jargon unless needed. Is he expressing himself or is he pontificating? Is he wasting his money or is he profligating? MS Word doesn’t even recognize the scholarly garbage sometimes. A lot of young writers and students try to impress with vocabulary but it’s the half-educated, those with something to prove generally, who do that and scorn simple language. 

Now there’s strong language that’s simple like he bolted instead of he ran, but that’s a different thing—color to be exact. Color: strong verbs and concrete nouns that create an image in the readers’ minds. “Something moved across the street” is a much weaker sentence than “An Arab woman with luxurious black hair and a purple shawl crossed the bomb-shattered street, hands over her eyes, crying.” Sometimes this is done through many adjectives and adverbs tacked onto weak verbs and abstract nouns, but it’s an awkward way to make sentences colorful. That’s violating the rules of economy. 

And freshness: not using clichés, thinking of original details and characterizing actions or settings. Not reaching for the default language that everyone uses, but going for original combinations of words or images. Originality might be a stretch (the whole nothing-is-original-anymore idea and all), but freshness means relying on creating things and even if it’s a discovery other people have made, you’re not using it because you saw it elsewhere. 

These are what I’ve known and studied for ages and have down well so even this typing, my thoughtless style, is better than what it used to be, but story structure, characterization, how to incorporate themes and settings, and the like are topics I need work on. I wrote down a lot of exercises and skimmed the early garbage on the creative process (something they admit they know little about so why are they writing about it?) and went to characterization chapters. I studied three and made a few pages of notes and did one of the exercises while there.

Then I went for more fast food. These camera angles in my car depress me like hell. It’s not flattering. You’re going to find me ugly eventually if you only see those. They would not be a good first impression. I try not to worry about them but I do and I can’t email you to talk to you and feel less neurotic about these things, even if I don’t approach the topic, talking to you eases me. And what if I have a panic? I can’t email you right now. It fucking sucks. I need you. I need to talk to you. I hate this. I love you. We’ll talk tomorrow I hope, even if just emails. It’s better than nothing. Just please don’t give up. I don’t know what to do if you give up.

I found a few videos that I never uploaded from Korea. I haven’t watched them but I’m guessing they’re depressing so I didn’t upload them before. Maybe I wll now. It’s late so I’m thinking I’ll go to sleep and hope I just go through and only come out with darkness because that’s better than the memories of nightmares.