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Going Spelunking
Dec. 28th, 2021 08:27 pmTonight's the night, y'all. I am going to wade into the depths of an abandoned draft and start rewriting. There is NOTHING I hate more than reading my own drafts. I will procrastinate for months between finishing a draft and editing because I hate it so much. Back when I used to act, I could never watch myself on video. It's the same exact thing. I know it's bad and completely unsustainable for an artist, and it's something I acknowledge that I need to just get over.
The funny part is that the draft is usually not that terrible in the end, and even if parts of it are truly awful, it's not that hard to fix. I'm not sure what I'm so afraid of. I suspect part of the problem is that I force myself to go into a trance and shove aside my inner control freak while I'm writing because if I didn't, I'd never get a single word onto the page. But then I need that control freak part of me to be at peak performance to edit, and the control freak part of my mind is intimidated by the uninhibited part and the potentially weird, embarrassing, uncomfortable stuff it has to say. At the same time, weird and uncomfortable is ON BRAND for me and something I actively cultivate, BUT in a very specific way. Weird and uncomfortable in a targeted, thought-out way is good. Unintentionally weird and uncomfortable is bad.
Do I need to rethink my need for control over my attempts at transgression? It makes me think of my senior year of undergrad when I was in this religious studies seminar. It dealt with surveillance, imperialism, and authoritarianism as modern representations of the eyes of God. You know, classic liberal arts shit, highly mock-able. But it was a great course with a brilliant professor. Anyway I wrote a paper on the book Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, which features a conspiracy called the Wallflower Order that is basically the white patriarchal colonialist anti-fun brigade. They, like me, crave control and hate dancing, but, unlike me, they want to piss on everybody's parade. So I wrote the first draft of my paper and went to discuss it with my professor in office hours. He read it, and then he said, "It's an exemplary essay, and that's the problem. It's like it was written by the Wallflower Order."
Therein lies my predicament.
The funny part is that the draft is usually not that terrible in the end, and even if parts of it are truly awful, it's not that hard to fix. I'm not sure what I'm so afraid of. I suspect part of the problem is that I force myself to go into a trance and shove aside my inner control freak while I'm writing because if I didn't, I'd never get a single word onto the page. But then I need that control freak part of me to be at peak performance to edit, and the control freak part of my mind is intimidated by the uninhibited part and the potentially weird, embarrassing, uncomfortable stuff it has to say. At the same time, weird and uncomfortable is ON BRAND for me and something I actively cultivate, BUT in a very specific way. Weird and uncomfortable in a targeted, thought-out way is good. Unintentionally weird and uncomfortable is bad.
Do I need to rethink my need for control over my attempts at transgression? It makes me think of my senior year of undergrad when I was in this religious studies seminar. It dealt with surveillance, imperialism, and authoritarianism as modern representations of the eyes of God. You know, classic liberal arts shit, highly mock-able. But it was a great course with a brilliant professor. Anyway I wrote a paper on the book Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, which features a conspiracy called the Wallflower Order that is basically the white patriarchal colonialist anti-fun brigade. They, like me, crave control and hate dancing, but, unlike me, they want to piss on everybody's parade. So I wrote the first draft of my paper and went to discuss it with my professor in office hours. He read it, and then he said, "It's an exemplary essay, and that's the problem. It's like it was written by the Wallflower Order."
Therein lies my predicament.
