Battling with the Quill and Self

I woke up closer to noon this morning, but at least I put the rest of the day to good use. I vacuumed two rooms and dusted one, washed two panes of the windows in my room, and scrubbed the bathtub; washed a load of delicate laundry and managed to shrink a sweatshirt that was already too small for me; and then went shopping and brought home a lot of ingredients for the '18th century' meal I want to make tomorrow. Late in the evening I made hot chocolate by heating, but not scalding, milk and then melting a chocolate bar into it. On the one hand, I was too lazy to whip it into the really nice froth that was I believe really one of the points that made hot chocolate so attractive three hundred years ago. On the other, it was still tasty.

My resolution for the New Year was to finally write a long story that I might want to have published. But today, aside from realizing that I will likely find my ideas running out by the end of the first chapter, I was also worried that maybe I've become a lousy writer for lack of practice and that I am by no means ready to write at greater length.

Besides it is lovely to put no pressure on one's self to write anything that anyone will ever see. It takes away the urge to consider one's own writing great even if it's frankly horrible, out of sheer stubbornness and a wish to save face about something one put a lot of time into. My ego seems more healthy and bulletproof without it. There is no sense of competition in a dog-eat-dog market. And if I can't produce anything nice at present, nobody cares. And if I disapprove of a book or a poem or something, I can say so without worrying too much about succumbing to sour grapes.

But I think as I did as a teenager or even a child: it's frustrating to be somewhat good at something and yet to have no respectable plan how to improve in it. One thing that has helped with growing older is that there is more material, subject matter and abstract knowledge and personal experience, to rely on as fuel for a story. But the mental discipline to round out the knowledge and think it thoroughly through in a short period of time (instead of riding the same train of thought off and on for months or years, and finally reaching a breakthrough because of a coincidence) is lacking.

Perhaps it's a disadvantage of breaking off twice at university, to fear that I dabble in a lot but don't pull much through, and I feel a bit like I'm telling tall tales when I list all of the eclectic subjects I tried studying ever-so-briefly. Fortunately, at work, I've been able to feel that I do have a good work ethic once an evident need for it arises. A thing that Papa told me that helped me as a teenager, dragging myself through half-finished homework that I never found very helpful to the greater world and ending up feeling that I was a lazy bum who could never achieve anything, was that he thought I would be good for 'mission-critical' work. If there's anything that really, absolutely needs doing, I can do it. I need to find a worthy purpose for writing. But I think the danger is to believe that an egotistical manifestation of my self is God's gift to the greater world. So perhaps I just need to wait until I find the story, and honestly acknowledge that, whose purpose is just that it is important to me individually. In which case, pursuant to my past practices, I don't need to push myself to put anything out in public.

Lastly, I think that stories should ripen fully before they are plucked, so even if good ideas come, I will have to wait a long time before I'm happy with the way they've been worked out.