I bought a sheaf of parchment paper online, so I could write letters to my gramma on something more aesthetically pleasing and larger than postcards of the Corniche. This week has been a mix of blessings and curses, and beyond either class of events, largely uneventful in total. I am struck often by the way that I have notebooks of every size and description, the exact sort of rolling ball pens I most favor, and not one but four computers available even in my living space. One cheap, blue plastic-cover spiral notebook lies down beside my bed to catch slippery ideas about technologies, story plots, or odd thoughts – some nights I even end up jotting down the occasional poem.
But with all of those implements, I nonetheless find myself not writing when I feel I ought to be writing with alarming frequency. It is fairly common wisdom that if you are passionate about something, when you are doing it, making it, performing it, whatever verb you employ, you can lose track of time and have little effort needed to work hard and diligently at whatever task your passion requires. So the reluctance that I have towards writing on developing stories seems, in my low-rent self-psychoanalysis, to suggest that I do not possess sufficient passion towards writing.
What I do enjoy, however, is creating complex and detailed images, experiences, and even playing out whole scenes of characters – yet screenplays, too, hold little appeal to me as an output for creative expression. Where I have always felt happiest and most passionate is creating “things” in front of a video camera, composing scenes, imagining long and elaborate sequences of images that are not always furthering a conventional narrative. I have found that I write more or less out of frustration that the medium I find most comfortable is so impenetrably expensive and high-input, but the ideas will not leave me alone.
One attempt I made, briefly, to rectify my lack of skills with animation of any sort (to get around the immense capital costs of even amateur filmmaking) was to learn 3D modelling with blender. It is a powerful open-source tool for 3D modelling, but it also even less friendly to a non-obsessive than crafting film-like scenes with prose or poetry.
I realize that this entry sounds very much like whining, “oh, woe is me, I don’t have a film studio at my beck and call.” I am acutely aware of the incredible phenomenon that is Primer and several other films that reached an incredible level of technical and storytelling quality on budgets accessible even to a petit bourgeois such as myself. Perhaps, when I have “made my fortune” here in the Gulf, I can go out on a financial and personal limb and devote a couple of years to attempting to manifest my imaginings in video form. In the meantime, I am still trying to capture some ideas and imagery using my limited means of language and fiction-writing experience.
Dictionopolis 