So, lately I have been trying this thing called productivity. It’s kind of weird, and isn’t something that I am all that familiar with.
Well, that sounds bad.
Let me clarify.
It’s not that I am not a productive person because I believe that I am, but only when I have an end game, only when I have a goal to accomplish. For a long time, I kind of stopped creating goals for myself because I thought that I was accomplishing things. I thought that by keeping busy with menial tasks that I was doing something, and that couldn’t be further from the truth. I was merely keeping my mind occupied enough to think that I was accomplishing something, and thinking about it, it kind of makes you sick, you know? Like, thinking about it, you’re just biding time, waiting for someone or something to snap you into the next mode of productivity, and that’s not living at all.
You can’t expect anyone to hand you anything, and I think to an extent that I let that happen for a little while. Not that I expected someone to ring the doorbell with an opportunity and wait long enough for me to run downstairs and answer it, but I think that I have kind of waited for opportunity to come to me, and let’s be serious, who has that ever worked for? Okay, Will Smith’s kids don’t count. They were going to be famous no matter what they looked like or what they did, but for us mortals, opportunity doesn’t knock on your door. It’s in a car somewhere, flying down the highway and if you’re lucky, you’ll pull up next to it and get a glimpse of what it has to offer. It won’t ever slow down long enough for you to line up the cars, open your window and dive into the backseat (summer-movie-blockbuster style), but it will let you catch a glimpse of the driver’s GPS, maybe not the final destination, but you’ll see what route he’s taking. It will give you just enough to get somewhere if you want to get there.
And it kind of makes you think, you know? It makes you wonder what opportunities you missed out on, it makes you think where you would be if you stepped outside of the box and onto that metaphorical highway.
I’m not saying that I’ve been sitting in my computer chair for the past ten years, listening for that annoying chime to sound through the house so I can take off running. I mean, I went to college for seven years, I got a pair of Bachelor’s degrees, I worked full time during the winter, and at every event that I could work during the summer. It’s not like I would ever say that I was outright lazy, but I guess you could argue that I should have done more. I should have been more motivated. I should have been more decisive, and I would agree with all of those things.
But at the same time, I like to think that because I didn’t do more, that I wasn’t more motivated and that I wasn’t more decisive that I’ll learn from that, and that’s important too, you know?
So, I’m starting back at the fundamentals of the things that I know, and with each step I will probably need some help.
My first step is to get back on track with writing. By writing, I don’t necessarily mean blogs, but of course I will do that as well. I mostly mean works of fiction. I have had like three or four solid ideas for novels that I just never work on. I have notebooks scattered about my room littered with minute notes, and a hundred one liners that I jot down in my phone every time I think of them, but I never do anything with them. They never evolve past that passing idea, and part of that scares me.
It scares me because sometimes when I look back at the notes, or the one liners they don’t mean anything. I look at them and think, what the hell does that even mean? And that’s kind of sad, I think, because at one point I thought it was a good enough idea to write down. I thought that it was good enough to spark something, but it never does, because I never let it. I never try to let it spark something. So, that’s what I’m doing. That’s where I’m going.
I started working on one pretty large piece of fiction. I don’t know if it will flesh out to be a novel or not, I’d like it to, but I don’t think that’s something that you can force. So, in the mean time, we’ll just say it’s something I am working on.
This is where the help comes in (not without a quick anecdote, of course).
My favorite part about college, about being in the Writing Arts department was getting insight from our workshops on the things that I wrote. It was about getting feedback on the ideas that I had, and listening to what other people had to say. No, it wasn’t because I was narcissistic with a Mothra sized ego. It was because I wanted to know what people thought, and how they thought. It was because at the time that I wrote something, I thought it was good. It doesn’t mean that it was. In fact, most of the time when I reread it, I thought it was pretty terrible, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything either. It’s hard judging your own writing because you kind of get sick of reading it after a while. It kind of gets stale sometimes when you read the same thing over and over again because you already know what it says and you already know how you say it.
The point is, I think that like anything in this world, writing needs a little bit of help to grow, and I think an outside perspective can do provide that assistance. It’s kind of like how they say that talking or singing to a plant helps it grow. Some people used to think that plants grew when you talked to them because the plant absorbed whatever you told it, it kept your secrets, and therefore it got bigger because it kept it all in. This is kind of similar to that. I mean, I don’t want you to tell me your secrets (unless they’re really, really good ones), I kind of just want someone to help my writing grow.
Back to the point.
I kind of want to share what I’m writing with a handful of people, but only if they think that they’ll have time to look it over and give me some feedback. Let me start by saying, I don’t want someone that is going to read it and say, “This part sucks. A lot.” But I also I don’t want someone to read it and say, “Hey, that’s really good. Great job.” Instead, I kind of want someone that will be objective and say things like, “I think that the part where this happens could be a little bit stronger. Like, you could use a little bit more detail to get this point across.” or “I don’t think that point is strong enough. Like, did you mean this? or that?”, or “Where are you going with this? Is this part important enough to stay in? It’s kind of stale or repetitive.” etc.
I want input because as much as I am writing for myself, I am writing because I want to create something that other people will want to read. Not commercially necessarily. Not like Twilight or Vampire Diaries or whatever that junk is, but something fluid. Something that makes sense, and has some sense of meaning, even if it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
So, if you think you might be interested, email me at jah713@gmail.com.
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p.s. challenge accepted! 🙂