During my first semester of Creative Writing, I felt a great energy behind my writing, one which doesn’t seem to exist right now. Maybe it is the absence of the literary high I got from reading the techniques of Robert Olen Butler, as he showed how to obtain the power to extract with great accuracy the contents of the sub-conscious (the white-hot core) and place them on the page. I don’t remember enough of the sensation of diving deep in the core to be able to recreate it, especially not for the type of writing exercises that I am having to perform this semester. Starting the semester with fiction is like dropping me on my head, I don’t know which way is up anymore. Poetry has always been my forte, and something that I found myself to be good at. I can integrate my thoughts into those of others and expand their worlds of fantasy, but I can’t seem to create my own world. I have had many ideas for this first chapter of a novel project which I am currently struggling with, but too many of them seem cliche (some might say “Classic”). I want to be original, but there doesn’t seem to be a world I am interested enough in to bring creativity to it. When I finally lock on to an idea, I find something wrong with it, something I don’t like and I move my creativity into searching for other ideas. Three years ago, I redefined what I am. I defied everything that I had set up for myself and everything that everyone thought I was. I was not an externally creative individual. I functioned more like an I.T. borg drone. Without end-users to support, this didn’t go very far, although, the technical is still where most of my energy and creativity lies. With my visual arts I can combine interests, I can put line into vessels, and I can put vessels into line, but somehow, writing about ceramics doesn’t seem to bring me to very much interest. Writing code and writing fiction are very similar, they are both creative works that are mostly theoretical, and almost never work on the first try, even though that first failed try is required before you can ever begin to hope to see a working final product. If I have my own fantasy world, it is likely digital in nature, and probably has a Matrix like quality, but that has been done before, and no one seemed to like it. Perhaps I could enter that fantasy world and bring something new and interesting to it. Currently I am working on a “safe” novel idea, which I don’t think will go very far, but should at least be a nice enough exercise to get me going.
On a related note, I am a bit puzzled by the way I feel toward GITI’s Document Manager functionality currently. I have been told by another person that the module seems lacking and doesn’t seem as though it would be good for the creative process. It presently looks like this: http://images.icurtis.me/blog/Doc.PNG. I go between thoughts on this myself. Sometimes I look at it and think it is too cluttered and consider making it more “paper-like” and having it accessible outside of the primary GITI interface, to reduce the level of distraction, but then there are times when it would be nice for it to be more friendly, prettier and not as sterile. The two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, so I could do both, but there are still concerns over changing what is for something that could potentially be better, or worse.
