Counting Numbered Days
"For a while we can smile for the people that we're passing, and even if they're asking we can lie."
When I first started taking my writing seriously, I carried a notebook around with me at all times, scribbling in it when thoughts or feelings occured, or when I was struck by a particular visual, sound, or smell. I don't do that anymore, largely because I've come to put a great deal of trust in a more intuitive part of my mind, a part I like to let lead the way when I get down to the actual writing of any given piece.
Still, there are times when I make a particular connection or find myself thinking in terms of a certain sequence or rhythm of words and I just have to make a note of it. Somewhere along the line I began using my mobile phone for this, writing my ideas down as a text message and then saving it in my outbox.
This morning was a strange one. At just after seven, I felt about as far from tired as you can be, yet I knew I had to be up for work at four and that it would be best if I got myself into bed by eight or nine. I took a bath and continued with my second reading of Stephen King's Bag Of Bones for an hour or so, letting myself fall into a fictional world and hoping that the warmth and the words would set me on my way towards sleep. And they did. By nine, I was tucked up in bed and dozing.
The problem with this method is that I think and analyse endlessly on my reading, often to the extent that I have to stop whatever I'm doing and go back to the book that's on my mind, either to see theories followed up and developed, patterns and author-specific quirks showing themselves, or for the simple pleasure of getting back to those characters and that place. With Bag Of Bones, the itch behind my thoughts concerned the narrator's description of a state of mind he claims is common to writers, a way of thinking that borders on a trance. Though this state is massively exaggerated in a book that, after all, concerns itself with the supernatural, I saw what King was getting at in a way I hadn't done the first time I'd read and disliked the book a few years back.
I was mostly asleep, and I couldn't have told you in any great detail what I was thinking about. All I know is that I was making connections all over the place and getting so excited about it that I was waking myself up. I remember lying there for what might have been minutes and might have been hours, possibly slipping in and out of sleep, possibly not. I remember sitting up in bed, reaching down for my phone, and tapping at the keys for several minutes before lying down and almost immediately falling into a proper sleep.
When I got in from work tonight, the first thing I did was sit down and finish Bag Of Bones. Nothing I found there reminded me of what I'd been thinking. The narrator's idea of a mental 'zone' slipped entirely into the supernatural, where it came to represent a telepathic link between several of the main characters. Fun, but not the thread my tired mind had grasped so frantically at some hours before.
I picked up my phone, went into its memory, and found I had written the following: 'Couting numbered days. Ray Garratty connections haunted house. The changing face of THE GIRL. Stevey King. Not exclusive 2 writer, but COMMUNICATION...all in a day's work. Patchwork. What r my THEMES?'
Welcome to the oblique and obscure world of Michael's notes to himself. I do still own a notepad, and I almost always laugh when I open it, because the first page is covered with three words I scribbled untidily in biro whilst walking along the A41 one sunny afternoon in the mid-nineties. The nonsense phrase they make up is 'white chocolate snails'. I have never torn that page out because I hope that one day I'll remember what it means and why I wrote it.
Numbered Days is an Eels song with a chorus that includes the refrain 'counting numbered days'. When I put it on a little while ago, those first minor chords immediately reminded me of lying in bad and feeling a kind of bittersweet happiness this morning. Sure, writer boy thinks about a lot of things. But at the moment, he thinks mostly of a girl called Jennifer and how he aches to be near her, forever staring at his mental calendar.
I've been here before. Not like this, but I have. That's what I meant when I referred to 'the changing face of THE GIRL'. In my experience, this is more a male thing than a female thing, but then most of those that have bared their souls in my direction have been men. We grow up with an ideal girl in mind, a dream girl. When we're young, it's all about the looks. That's how crushes happen. We see somebody, maybe on the TV or in a movie or in our science class or wherever, and we learn that lust can kick us in the stomach every bit as hard as our youthful idea of love. Then we grow up and start to understand what we need as well as what we want, and somewhere inside our heads we develop a fantasy companion that has the best of both. She isn't an imaginary friend, nothing so crude. She's a basis for comparison. And since nobody could ever live up to such lofty standards, we learn first how to be disappointed and then how to bring our heads down out of the clouds a little more often.
When you're still really a child, that disappointment and understanding is crushing. It's also necessary. You can never love somebody you looked down to find. We need to be brought low and made to see how awful reality can be before we can raise our heads and dream again. When I raised my head, I saw Jennifer. I don't know how it'll turn out, but I'll only need to tear a few more pages from the calendar before I do. I'm counting numbered days.
Seeing the name Ray Garraty in Bag Of Bones made me smile. King has used the name before, in a novella called The Long Walk he wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. In that wonderful little story, Garraty was the hero. In Bag Of Bones, Ray Garraty is merely the name of a murderer in the protagonist's novel. Still, King did that on purpose. I think King does everything on purpose, and that's why I enjoy reading him.
Connections. That's what this is all about. You read enough of any one author and you begin to see their themes. A larger pattern becomes clear. You can see the things they introduce on purpose (a character called Ray Garraty), and the things they just can't stay away from (One of Stephen King's is haunted houses, so scratch a few more cryptic words from that message to myself). In fact, one of the main reasons I dislike King's more recent work is that he has started to make the connections and subtexts all too obvious. I preferred it when I felt like I was getting something that quite a lot of people were going to miss. That made me feel an intimacy with the storyteller that only dragged me further into the tale. Now he's all but writing the clues in CAPITAL LETTERS, he's leaving me cold.
Because the writer's job, to go back to that text message, is COMMUNICATION. All In A Day's Work, to quote yet another Eels lyric and let you see just how subconscious a place I was in. Sometimes it's emotion, sometimes theory, sometimes fact. For me, it's about taking the things I see and feel and making them into something I can give to others. That's putting it mildly, by the way. On my better days, I like to think I'm throwing them at others, probably laughing and screaming and flipping the bird as I do.
In all honesty, I've never bought the idea of writing as a job. The only way I see it like that is that I'd be very happy if it could someday take the place of the crappy jobs I've had and be the thing that I do to make my living. Other than that, well, I guess it can be a hell of a struggle sometimes, but mostly it's a joy. For this boy, there is simply nothing that compares to reading through something that came from my thoughts and my feelings and being surprised enough to think, "Holy shit, this is good."
Presumptuous? Yes. Egotistical? Sure. Wonderful? Un-fucking-doubtedly.
Having considered all of this, I finally understood what it was that got me so excited this morning. For the first time, I had a clear and perfect picture of my themes and obsessions. I knew what they were, what they meant, and the various directions I wanted to take them in. If you'd have asked me, in my insomniac daze, what I was going to be writing ten years from now, I could have told you.
Of course, subconscious revelations and obscure text messages have a downside. If you asked me the same question now, for example, I'd tell you to fuck off.
Because I really don't remember.
When I first started taking my writing seriously, I carried a notebook around with me at all times, scribbling in it when thoughts or feelings occured, or when I was struck by a particular visual, sound, or smell. I don't do that anymore, largely because I've come to put a great deal of trust in a more intuitive part of my mind, a part I like to let lead the way when I get down to the actual writing of any given piece.
Still, there are times when I make a particular connection or find myself thinking in terms of a certain sequence or rhythm of words and I just have to make a note of it. Somewhere along the line I began using my mobile phone for this, writing my ideas down as a text message and then saving it in my outbox.
This morning was a strange one. At just after seven, I felt about as far from tired as you can be, yet I knew I had to be up for work at four and that it would be best if I got myself into bed by eight or nine. I took a bath and continued with my second reading of Stephen King's Bag Of Bones for an hour or so, letting myself fall into a fictional world and hoping that the warmth and the words would set me on my way towards sleep. And they did. By nine, I was tucked up in bed and dozing.
The problem with this method is that I think and analyse endlessly on my reading, often to the extent that I have to stop whatever I'm doing and go back to the book that's on my mind, either to see theories followed up and developed, patterns and author-specific quirks showing themselves, or for the simple pleasure of getting back to those characters and that place. With Bag Of Bones, the itch behind my thoughts concerned the narrator's description of a state of mind he claims is common to writers, a way of thinking that borders on a trance. Though this state is massively exaggerated in a book that, after all, concerns itself with the supernatural, I saw what King was getting at in a way I hadn't done the first time I'd read and disliked the book a few years back.
I was mostly asleep, and I couldn't have told you in any great detail what I was thinking about. All I know is that I was making connections all over the place and getting so excited about it that I was waking myself up. I remember lying there for what might have been minutes and might have been hours, possibly slipping in and out of sleep, possibly not. I remember sitting up in bed, reaching down for my phone, and tapping at the keys for several minutes before lying down and almost immediately falling into a proper sleep.
When I got in from work tonight, the first thing I did was sit down and finish Bag Of Bones. Nothing I found there reminded me of what I'd been thinking. The narrator's idea of a mental 'zone' slipped entirely into the supernatural, where it came to represent a telepathic link between several of the main characters. Fun, but not the thread my tired mind had grasped so frantically at some hours before.
I picked up my phone, went into its memory, and found I had written the following: 'Couting numbered days. Ray Garratty connections haunted house. The changing face of THE GIRL. Stevey King. Not exclusive 2 writer, but COMMUNICATION...all in a day's work. Patchwork. What r my THEMES?'
Welcome to the oblique and obscure world of Michael's notes to himself. I do still own a notepad, and I almost always laugh when I open it, because the first page is covered with three words I scribbled untidily in biro whilst walking along the A41 one sunny afternoon in the mid-nineties. The nonsense phrase they make up is 'white chocolate snails'. I have never torn that page out because I hope that one day I'll remember what it means and why I wrote it.
Numbered Days is an Eels song with a chorus that includes the refrain 'counting numbered days'. When I put it on a little while ago, those first minor chords immediately reminded me of lying in bad and feeling a kind of bittersweet happiness this morning. Sure, writer boy thinks about a lot of things. But at the moment, he thinks mostly of a girl called Jennifer and how he aches to be near her, forever staring at his mental calendar.
I've been here before. Not like this, but I have. That's what I meant when I referred to 'the changing face of THE GIRL'. In my experience, this is more a male thing than a female thing, but then most of those that have bared their souls in my direction have been men. We grow up with an ideal girl in mind, a dream girl. When we're young, it's all about the looks. That's how crushes happen. We see somebody, maybe on the TV or in a movie or in our science class or wherever, and we learn that lust can kick us in the stomach every bit as hard as our youthful idea of love. Then we grow up and start to understand what we need as well as what we want, and somewhere inside our heads we develop a fantasy companion that has the best of both. She isn't an imaginary friend, nothing so crude. She's a basis for comparison. And since nobody could ever live up to such lofty standards, we learn first how to be disappointed and then how to bring our heads down out of the clouds a little more often.
When you're still really a child, that disappointment and understanding is crushing. It's also necessary. You can never love somebody you looked down to find. We need to be brought low and made to see how awful reality can be before we can raise our heads and dream again. When I raised my head, I saw Jennifer. I don't know how it'll turn out, but I'll only need to tear a few more pages from the calendar before I do. I'm counting numbered days.
Seeing the name Ray Garraty in Bag Of Bones made me smile. King has used the name before, in a novella called The Long Walk he wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. In that wonderful little story, Garraty was the hero. In Bag Of Bones, Ray Garraty is merely the name of a murderer in the protagonist's novel. Still, King did that on purpose. I think King does everything on purpose, and that's why I enjoy reading him.
Connections. That's what this is all about. You read enough of any one author and you begin to see their themes. A larger pattern becomes clear. You can see the things they introduce on purpose (a character called Ray Garraty), and the things they just can't stay away from (One of Stephen King's is haunted houses, so scratch a few more cryptic words from that message to myself). In fact, one of the main reasons I dislike King's more recent work is that he has started to make the connections and subtexts all too obvious. I preferred it when I felt like I was getting something that quite a lot of people were going to miss. That made me feel an intimacy with the storyteller that only dragged me further into the tale. Now he's all but writing the clues in CAPITAL LETTERS, he's leaving me cold.
Because the writer's job, to go back to that text message, is COMMUNICATION. All In A Day's Work, to quote yet another Eels lyric and let you see just how subconscious a place I was in. Sometimes it's emotion, sometimes theory, sometimes fact. For me, it's about taking the things I see and feel and making them into something I can give to others. That's putting it mildly, by the way. On my better days, I like to think I'm throwing them at others, probably laughing and screaming and flipping the bird as I do.
In all honesty, I've never bought the idea of writing as a job. The only way I see it like that is that I'd be very happy if it could someday take the place of the crappy jobs I've had and be the thing that I do to make my living. Other than that, well, I guess it can be a hell of a struggle sometimes, but mostly it's a joy. For this boy, there is simply nothing that compares to reading through something that came from my thoughts and my feelings and being surprised enough to think, "Holy shit, this is good."
Presumptuous? Yes. Egotistical? Sure. Wonderful? Un-fucking-doubtedly.
Having considered all of this, I finally understood what it was that got me so excited this morning. For the first time, I had a clear and perfect picture of my themes and obsessions. I knew what they were, what they meant, and the various directions I wanted to take them in. If you'd have asked me, in my insomniac daze, what I was going to be writing ten years from now, I could have told you.
Of course, subconscious revelations and obscure text messages have a downside. If you asked me the same question now, for example, I'd tell you to fuck off.
Because I really don't remember.
posted by Michael at 7:23 PM
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