Q

This is Day 2 of CAP, i miss all the crazy people and their insane love for writing/arts there. It got me thinking.

When it comes to writing, this is the only space kept constant.

By that i mean lengthy, indulgent ramblings. My writings otherwise have shrunk into (presently): nothing.

At first i thought it was distillation. I learnt about economy of words and it’s power at about fifteen, but instead of maintaining the pure-essence level of poetry i’ve come down to a straight zero. It’s very strange and disconcerting, actually.. that i haven’t written (besides a scrap of sapphic poetry) in near to a year. This may be the longest drought yet. My greatest fear is that – following my writing patterns through the years – this isn’t a drought. It’s really just me having ran out of words.

When i first started writing fiction, which was Primary 1, i was undaunted by plot length logic grammar. The main point wasn’t the final product, just the act of writing. So at that age i purchased single-line exercise books in bulk and filled them endlessly with half-novels. Most of the time i have many stories going at once. They were embarrassingly wild, ungrammatical, unoriginal, all-over-the-place pieces, but all the same i’m dead jealous of the myself back then.. because i could actually write without thinking about writing. At times Celine and I co-wrote novels.. they usually steer straight towards farce.

My last and also proudest attempt at novels is also the ONLY long fiction i’ve actually completed. I spent close to a year with it writing EVERY DAY (in place of homework lolz). It was first person, highly influenced by chicklit (but about ten times funnier) (no, seriously), and by God was it enjoyable. It felt so good i wanted to start a second one but it fizzled out within three pages. That was in Primary 5/6.

In secondary school i stopped writing as prodigiously (i mean quantity-wise la), because i learnt about quality control. 14 was the age of consciousness and every idea i had went through a self-issued checklist of shittery before i was allowed to act on them. That was also when i developed – like everyone else – the need to see the end in things. So i switched to prose, because that was the only way i could finish anything.

I found that i liked prose A LOT – especially after discovering descriptive in English class – which truthtobetoldlak i was superb at. On the other hand my plots were utter crap so switching to micro-prose was my way of giving up on long fiction than anything else. Boo, me. Anyway, i focused mainly on prose that centered around minimal plots or single events, compensating with my rigorous attempts at description.

(I’m fully convinced that my A1 English for Os was acquired from my incredibly vivid, one-page long, almost erotic description of the buffet spread aboard a cruise. Eh i’m not even kidding about this. The entire essay was three-half pages and was a shitty as hell story about a woman on a cruise enjoying a buffet, encountering a shipwreck accident, finding herself in a lifeboat, and spending the rest of the time hallucinating about food until she was rescued.. it ends with her eating biscuits. Yeah, the hell is wrong with me right? So yes, i think my food porn gave the examiner his best ever orgasm sitting by his lonely London fireplace with only a goblet of whiskey to bring him through the winter night. That’s how i got the grade.)

Anyway, besides self-consciousness, pretension and the frustrating focus on end results, 14 also brought along the want of experiment. So i tried my hand with scripts (naturally.. taking Drama and all), and found that i was sheer nonsense at it. Yes we do devising for every term assignment and exams and all but we NEVER. HAVE. SCRIPTS. It’s pure improvisation and then adjustments until we perfect it. The furthest i can go is a monologue and even with that i struggle. So i concede my lousiness and theatrical writing.

Then came poetry, because you know, it’s the new shit and all. There was a rash of opprobrious ones when i first started out and they stink of overkill and painful bathetic-ism. I now hide them they way boys hide their porn in multi-leveled folders on my PC and read them when i feel the occasional mix of sadism and the need for some good laughs.

Somewhere in upper Secondary i found the right way to write what i want to write.. and it was frankly quite magical. BUT it lasts only one collection long (enough for CAP portfolio + CAP mentorship portfolio). That was also where my words found exponential shrinkage. They were never really long to start with. My longest poem doesn’t fill up a page. My shortest is two lines. My personal favorite is 16 words. That was during CAP.

In the course of mentorship i was already losing my words. That i had to come up with a decent poem every few months that isn’t skimpy like a Baywatch bikini frightened me into nights of terror sleepless in bed in cold sweat. K not really, but it was pretty stressful – which i deal with poorly (stress, i mean). This came with the additional (and very, very scary) fear that people will actually. read. my. work. It’s okay when it’s just a panel of CAP staff.. but for it to be printed and like.. left in dusty library shelves.. yeah i was pretty much a wreck. It’s k because at last i did manage to churn them out accordingly; but i face them with a very confusing sense of pride with a strong cant towards embarrassment and disappointment.

After that came the As, and i only wrote one in that period of time. It wasn’t even for leisure. It was because i had something to say and it was the only way i could say it. I loved that one a lot. And then from there – nothing nada zilch. I can’t anymore it’s like writing constipation that’s been there for so long it’s solidified into a mess of toxic shit stones. When i try it just comes out pitiful – and when i try it’s not even that i want to write.. it’s more like i’m testing the waters to see if i still can.

Wow i hit middle-age fast.