Ideaaaaa

I had a pretty good idea to write but I forgot it. It's a really crappy feeling too, losing something that you thought was pretty solid in my head. I'm trying to retrace my steps to see if I can catch it again. As soon as I trace it I'm pinning it down. I was at work. I was eating breakfast, which consisted of ovaltine and pop-tarts. Then I... was eating this crappy candy from my childhood. Hey! That's what it was! I was going to write about how things from my childhood don't enthrall me as much anymore.

Well, now that I have THIS, I might as well save that concept for another day. It's not technically cheating, I think...

*ahem*

I hate it when I lose ideas. Sometimes I'll see a certain person on-campus, and I'll think "hey, they'd make a nice story." Or I'll be daydreaming and stumble on something interesting. I find random tidbits in books that could be used for conversation pieces, and I discover deep, philosophical quotes I can base a post on. And just like that they're gone, lost in the inability to retain most anything within my short-term memory. Not to say, however, that I always forget great, or even good ideas. I forget about things that suddenly sprout up in the back of my mind that I'm glad I didn't do (tribal tattoo, eighteenth birthday for one). I remember how at one point I wanted to own a snuggie (I refuse to buy one now because they made these "designer" prints, which are basically leopard-spotted, meaning that they have more or less affirmed that their audience are tacky moms who wear stiletto heels to the grocery store. DAMN YOU PRODUCT MARKETING!). I also groan at how I tried to be emo or indie or whatever in high school, wishing that idea had left my head at the time (More on that later. Actually no, never). But, no matter how I try to see the silver lining, an idea lost is an idea wasted, regardless if it's good or not.

David Sedaris is one of my favorite memoir writers. He notes that he keeps a little notebook around with him, jots down notes, and elaborates on them later. I actually tried this for a day. I was really nervous about looking pretentious, busting out some random notepad and just writing in the middle of nowhere, so whenever a thought or observation struck me, I would run off to a secluded corner and write it down. Eventually, I would start annotating anything interesting, and every couple minutes I would run off to some shady corner, then reenter society, looking over my shoulders, writing in a notebook furtively. If anyone was watching me, they'd probably think that I was engaging in multiple drug deals. It got so bad that I pretty much only use that little notebook to compose my grocery list now.

If I find something I HAVE to write about, I think about it constantly. I try to sear it into my brain, hide the idea in the wrinkles of my lobe to pluck out later. But if I go with this method, it consumes my conscious. The concept will strike me at inopportune times: during classes and conversations, it's all white noise as my thoughts begin to blossom. I'll find myself unable to sleep, and then wake up to only be thinking again about the same thing. I'll have to write it, and then find myself unsatisfied because it doesn't match the words in my mind, and then keep writing over and over and over, knowing that there's just too much of a boundary between the words I write and the mental images within my head. I need to accept that these are two separate realities, and no matter how much I want the thing in my head to exist on the page, it can never be. The best I can have is a doppelganger, a somewhat accurate facsimile. It's PRACTICALLY the same, but there's just this one unspeakable quality that prevents it from being one and the same.

Lately I've just been kind of freestylin' on it. I read this novella, "Ron Carlson Writes A Story." It's about how the director of the UCI creative writing program goes about writing a story. I always figured, it was through detailed planning, meticulous editing and constant revising that a story finds it's way into existence but it's NOT. So Carlson thinks that he wants to write a story about a mattress that falls out of a truck. Great. Except he kind of word-vomits everything else. Characters, places, scenarios, all of it just comes out of his head and onto the paper haphazardly, but the thing is that it all WORKS, and that's because he's not just throwing crap together. He creates a character, and then lets them live their own lives. I've found that in my spontanaetiy I made some pretty good stuff (this blog, for example). So I think I'm going to use this approach a lot more.

The creative process is something that still befuddles me. Is there a certain approach to create certain things, or are our brains just wired to do something a certain way? I still don't really know what works for me. I plan intensely on papers only to realize I had TOO much; I write papers in mere hours and realize just how much another hour or two could have helped if I had only planned ahead. I guess I need to strike a fine balance, but in the meantime I guess writing casually is the best thing for me. No mental thoughts of a guilliotine above my head to keep my head down and write. If anything, casuality justifies my habit of putting things off until the very last minute, and I do indeed like that.