Talking to Andy at the Gooey xmas: He said he wondered if the company slack was the best place to share my writing! But also said, he actually went back and re-read (and re-0read again) the poem I’d shared.
I said, I’m glad he appreciated it. And also, that I am trying to branch out into other ways of capturing thoughts and feelings, via poetry and short stories, but the biggest difficulty is finding a way to dumb things down.
I didn’t say “dumb down” this explicitly, but I think it was implied. I regretted this briefly, before almost immediately forgiving myself (why live life regretting things so frequently?).
why live life regretting things so frequently?
I know I can summarise almost anything via my preferred method of thought delivery — that being, words like this, in a blogging style — but I’m aware how inaccessible such a method is.
The difficulty, I think, is that when I write, I’m capturing a new insight. By transforming those insights into poetry or fiction, I’m recycling things I’ve already processed through previous words. That’s the hard part. I’m not great with doing things twice. Blogging, for me, is as close to putting pure thoughts into words; other kinds of writing abstract that, forcing me to re-state things I could better express in my preferred medium.
At the time, I also made an analogy to Tony Hawk, who we’d been talking briefly about in the context of his skill level. I said, if I write a poem, it feels like if Tony Hawk had to perform a basic ollie.
In hindsight though, that’s not very accurate. Writing in these new ways brings its own challenges, new ones. So to continue that analogy, the more varied writing tasks I’ve set for myself are more like, Tony Hawk writing a manual for other skaters. Perhaps he can perform the tricks himself, expertly and seemingly innately, but finding ways to express how to do that for others? That won’t come so easily.