Since I was a kid I've been decent at prose, but whenever I come up with an idea for a story or a subject I begin to see its limits or pick holes in it as soon as I begin writing it out. It makes everything I try and do seem impotent such that my will falls limp immediately. I come up with a good premise for a screenplay or a novel but after writing it out it feels so empty or I see the limits of its conclusion. The same thing occurs in other areas of my life but I've been able to use it to troubleshoot and point out problems before they occur & make preparations and contingencies ahead of time, which has been useful in making my political work more effective (which I of course often question the ultimate point of as well, but since my work is about fulfilling material needs it's at least possible for me to say, well, at an animal level suffering feels bad, and that pain is seemingly irreducible enough that my assignment holds water enough for the time being - though maybe I'll lose interest in this too with age?). As I get older it seems to me that all perception breaks down upon close enough scrutiny, and life appears from a human perspective as more like a nonsense of purely sensory experiences deranged by an overabundance of abstract semantic thought more than it is anything else. What is there left to say? How do I spin narrative content out of a morass when I know the lie underneath these things? I should give up on being any kind of an artist probably but I won enough competitions and had enough praise growing up only centred around my apparent writing ability and ability to articulate creative concepts, analyze films, etc. that dropping it would constitute identity death and remove the illusion of narrative sense from my own life, after which I would be staying alive for its own blind sake and not to any ends. Which gives me intimations of something cosmological, overwroughy and strung out like taffy to an infinitely thin line of burning agony. An existential tailspin that flows only in one direction, only able to become more and more balled up and shrinking the more the algorithm attempts to resolve itself. Sometimes I think I might be going schizo but then I seem to be able to put these things into words too cogently (and I don't have any hallucinations, or psychosis afaik) for that to be the case. Thoughts?
>>24869197>How do I touch eternity with one hand and life with the other?is that a metaphor for handguns?see image link for doc
>>24869197not reading all that boring info on your life sorry my friend. but:>whenever I come up with an idea for a story or a subject I begin to see its limits or pick holes in it as soon as I begin writing it outi think that's an interesting problem and it affects me too. all i can do is give you the advice i wish i'd received. i think your problem is the classic 'gifted kid' problem of impatience.my recommendation is to stop focusing on realising your idea, accept it will always elude you, and instead focus on the process of writing itself. i'm always more productive, and have more fun, when i start a story with a conception of a voice i want to write in, instead of an amorphous feeling i want to make concrete. this way you're setting yourself up to be constantly surprised rather than inevitably disappointed. i think you need be humble and radically restrict yourself to the task of creating sentences that will give another reader a reason to keep reading. focus less on eternity and more on the words on the page. when i did an art course i spent way too much energy trying to heroically birth a new aesthetic that would correspond to all the diffuse mysterious things i felt inside, and the result was feeble and confused and boring. i wish i had spent that time diligently sketching from life and studying art history, because i now know that humble patience is what leads to the real mysteries.
>>24869444more ideas on this theme. i read an interesting take on the distinction between pulp stories and 'literary fiction'. this was in a book that took pulp stories very seriously, so it wasn't being dismissive or snobbish, but the writer's point was: why is it that, even if we acknowledge all the interesting things going on in these tales, they will never draw us back in the same way that, like, a Kafka story does?their conclusion was that, if all artworks are in some way incomplete, if they all fail to capture what you called eternity, or others might call life, and are inherently haunted by disappointment, then pulp stories repress this by saying 'the *real* pleasure is waiting for you after the cliffhanger, the mystery will be revealed in the next issue, the Platonic cowboy story you long for but can never grasp can be yours for just 25 cents,' whereas in literary fiction that lack or emptiness is somehow incorporated into the work itself.hard to pin down exactly what they mean by 'incorporated in the work itself', but i think of it in metaphorical terms: good writing is not exactly, at its core, the expression of an idea or emotion, but rather the building of a kind of shrine to something that doesn't itself come forth. it's a tomb built around an impenetrable crypt. humbly you chisel the marble and check the soundness of your pillars, but you have accept, as a sad sacrifice, the death of what all this is dedicated to.(i might have strayed far from your original concern and be talking purely to myself here.)
>>24869471one more screenshot and then i'll get back to work.
