Life Notes Notes

Hopefully some of you read my new year post where i talked about starting a new diary/journal (any difference? I dunno, same roots at least...). Maybe some of you reading this remember it, but basically i want to write about every day of the year. The reason i'm bringing it up now is because i reached my hundredth side (y'know, fifty pages, one-hundred sides...) recently. That equates to roughly seventy-four earth days, i.e. 1.35 pages per day. Do we actually have any stats fans reading this blog? I sure hope so!

Mainly i wanted to share some insights about how the project's going so far. I'm not necessarily going to share every hundred pages - i don't really know. I'm playing a lot of this by ear, if you couldn't already tell. First off, since i just dropped the stat, i think i'm writing too much about each day. This is made worse by my wavering commitment. It has wavered to the point of, at one time, three weeks going by un-diarized. This means that some days have been almost completely forgotten, which means that the diary entry has been very small.

Sure, sometimes i comment in detail on how little i remember, or how annoyed i am at forgetting things, but in general, when you can't remember something, there's not much to say. Any of you folks who know about stats will realise, if my average is near to 1.5 pages a day, and some days i've not had much to say, there are some days where i've said a 'heckuvalot' (scientific term for 'shedload'). In a knee-jerk sort of a way, i think this is too much.

But that has been one of the points of this endeavour, that i look at how much i'm writing, and the 'quality' of it. One could describe 'quality' as vividness of writing, which will obviously be low if i talk about a whole day in one sentence, although one sentence can also sum up a great emotional force that was prevalent throughout that day, so 'it's swings and roundabouts'. It's tough, and there ain't never gonna be no right/wrong answers, but like i say i'm talking about 'simple' 'feelings' here.

There have been some 'big days', such as a trip to Yorkshire with my good friend J.W., where i have written many pages, and some days that had 'big moments', usually a football match i'll admit, that i can write in half a side. I think what i'm reinforcing is that the 'piece' dictates its own rules, and that it's the writer's job to try, to tinker and to reflect, but above all to listen to the material, find out what it wants and move on from there. I'm not saying i've edited these pieces. As of yet it's all first draft stuff. I don't even know if i'll type any of it/all of it up, but my point is that the more you write (in general?), the more aware you are as you are writing (of course some times you are so in the moment that this is not the case, but please remember i am essentially writing 'non-fiction' here, not getting too led away by a muse). I suppose what that means is that you can become annoyed with yourself more as you write. As i'm half-way through a paragraph on what a lampshade looked like, i feel myself urging myself to get on to other more pressing issues. But sometimes details is important...

Hmm i wasn't originally intending on drawing this back so consciously to writing practice. 'At the end of the day' i was (and am) trying to increase my writing stamina, and to self-reflexively assess the way i look at the world. I think both these areas have improved to an extent, although sometimes concentration is poor. And, especially when i have weeks to catch up on, the task seems daunting and i put it off. So there's still a maturity issue, i suppose, but mostly when i'm not down the well of depression i can get myself going pretty readily.

Ah i dunno. I'm certainly not here to tell you how to write for crying out loud. I don't even know that myself. I'm life's big struggler... I'm just here to tell you how this 'experiment' is going. I hope you get something from this. I sort of have. To be fair maybe you should just read some books about writing theory...

This is what there is from me.

Peace and love.