Assigned Blog Post 07 - ???

I wrote something?!

Oh look, it's like 10 pages. That's within the acceptable length. Is it good? Are people going to like it? Would that make it good? Does it make me feel good about it? Does it make me feel good about writing it? Does it make me feel good about having it done? Would that make it good? What does "good" mean?

I know people are going to react to it, at least. For one, it's messed up. Also I've already seen people react to parts of it. Is that what I wanted?

I know I wanted to be different. I know this is definitely different, otherwise I'd have lost faith in humanity a really long time ago. But then again, I'm already different from everyone else, so shouldn't that have been enough?

For me, writing my first short story was like ???. I know, that's pretty ambiguous. And that's the point. I have (had?) pretty much no idea what I was doing when I wrote my story. What I wrote was (hopefully) not some great journey of self discovery. It wasn't even about one. If anything, it was more like a great journey of nonexistent-character-identity discovery for readers. Which means that I had to put myself in their shoes to see if they could actually discover what I had to discover they had to discover?

???

.   .   .

I guess if I had to stop avoiding the question and actually put it into words, though, the process of writing for me was like sharpening a pencil. That may sound all literary and good, but there's a few things about pencils to consider.

First is that pencils are not pens. The symbol of a writer has always been a pen, and the simile I'm using to describe my writing does not involve a pen. Does that mean my writing isn't writing? Perhaps. If I were to use a pen, I'd have to be like all the other writers, crossing out unwanted parts and tossing them aside, creating a pile of failure. Instead, I hid in the fact that pencil can be erased, failure can be forgotten. I'm sure many would consider my short story to be a giant, frustrating pile of crap. I see where they're coming from, and it turned out that way partly because I lost touch with the very concept of failure, and the learning and reward that comes out of it.

Second is that pencils get dull, unlike pens. And when you sharpen a pencil, you shave away the wood between your hand and the lead, you shave off the layers between you and the thing that's making your ideas visible. In essence, I found the writing process to be one that took my words straight from the core. Unfortunately for the world, my core is some kind of convoluted mess that apparently takes the form of a violent pedo zombie thing when represented on paper. Unfortunately for the world, those layers between me and the thing that makes my ideas visible are what make some of my other pieces of writing "good".

Maybe I should put more effort into being a writer, into picking up a pen to write. Pens nowadays are made of plastic or metal, so they're hard to shave off.