I need to write more. I need to be prolific. If I simply just wait for ideas to strike me, then I am consequently losing all that un-inspired time doing nothing. So I will write a little bit every day, methinks.
I have a friend who is a music teacher who also teaches English. Before the semester change, she was working on this project with her classes about writing a novel per week. It was less about quality of content than it is about encouraging the flow and volume of words stuck in the constipated imaginations of her students to flow incrementally easier from their brains.
I really liked it. So I thought I would give it a try. Just write and write until my creative juices are flowing and maybe some day be good enough to even enter the bowels of the literary world.
Man, I'm on a real potty-mouth tangent here.
I used to think whipping up a blog entry was my version of a real writer doing real commentary, but I've known, realized, and now really, really RE-realized it takes more than that to whip up anything worth reading.
Besides delivery, timing, style, mechanics, grammar, and all THAT hullabaloo, there is research. And no, I'm not talking about the obvious fields in which a writer had better have his facts backed up with reliable sources.
I'm talking about the kinds of details that, even when you think you know it all, even when you think you are more of an expert on any particular subject than most other people, you don't know. Little details that make you realize you still have to do that research. Case in point, my Mexicans Kick Ass thing I did.
I started this out of being inspired by this article (which actually had started with this article,) wanting to write in that style, with that kind of flare, but also that much "factuality" to it. Now, putting the stamp of truth on something that is clearly only perception, you have to be willing to take a stand that perception is truth, that it's your truth, and you have to go about setting that up.
You also have to take risks that expose you. Let me change that. I would have to take risks that exposed me. You can do whatever you want. I don't want to be naked in front a bunch of people! Once upon a time I had worked so hard to be a cool, impenetrable fortress of good guy laughey laugh!
Only I was never a guy and I was sooooo phucking miserable then!
Anyway, tangent aside, I knew with some weight of surety that I was the only one around me who knew and talked and thought and lived and breathed such a Mexican upbringing as I had, with a dad who read everything he could get his hands on about Aztecs culture; and fused this into every aspect of my childhood with all of this education (still showing us how to take pride in our own country.)
It was because I hadn't realized in the beginning just how very focused an upbringing it was that, when I did, it became instantaneously imperative to write about it. But when I sat down and started at it, I found I had to do lots and lots more research just to get things like numbers, figure out percentages (Amy Math!!), and double check that I did, indeed, have my facts straight.
