Vicarious

It becomes very difficult to avoid repeating yourself when you write every single day. I have thus far made no particular effort to avoid repeating myself, but my tendency to do that is starting to bore me a little. This is why I try to play so many games. It gives me something new to write about. That's why I've broken the cycle of doing nothing but playing League of Legends or World of Warcraft all day. If I play through games at a breakneck pace, I feel like I always have something to write about. That just hasn't been true lately. I'm in a bit of a dry spell. I'm still playing games, but they're the same games I've been playing for awhile. There's only so much I can say about these games! And there's one game in particular that I'd rather not talk about today since I've talked about it over and over for a week now.

There are other things I could potentially write about, of course. I could start doing some reading and I could discuss my thoughts on whatever it is I choose to read. Granted, that's something else that takes up my time, a commodity that seems as if it's in short supply already. I have loads of free time but it never seems like enough! I want to do everything in the world, but I settle for lounging around playing video games all day. That's really all I do. I think this blog can really attest to that.

Getting back to writing fiction would also be a great thing for me to do, but it's been agonizingly apparently the last few times I've tried that I don't have the same passion for it as I did before. I've written a lot for that story but getting back into it is tough. I don't feel I have the ability to visualize those characters or even that world. I don't know how to immerse myself in that, to breathe life into it. I also feel pretty comfortable saying that what I've written for that story so far is mediocre at best. It's really not stellar writing. It's very repetitious and frequently doesn't flow like I want it to. I wrote a lot in those days about how I was trying to avoid ruthlessly editing myself during the writing process but it's not pleasant stuff to read when I go back to it. It feels pointless to go back and edit it now when I haven't approached anything even resembling a conclusion.

If I felt really passionate about my writing, I could put forth the effort to make it good. I could write up an outline and map out the trajectory of my story. I could flesh out my characters' backgrounds and plot how these characters interact with each other. It would not be difficult to jot down some notes on general themes I'd like to cover over the course of the story--but I'm finding that it's not something I feel particularly interested in doing right now. The story began as an exercise in making things up as I went along--and that was fun to do. The details of the plot were just as much of a surprise to me as they would be to anyone else. As a result of this, it turned into this colossal piece of directionless writing with no real substance or. . .purpose. I was hoping that whole time that I could mold the raw materials into something that made sense, but I can't help but feel now that there's not much there worth salvaging.

I used to consider myself a writer. I spent a lot of my free time writing and making up stories. I also spent a lot of time reading. This was back when I was a teenager, ten or more years ago. I don't read at all now and I don't spend very much time making up narratives in my head. When I'm at home I'd rather relax and experience narrative through games. I could definitely start reading again, but it's just something that I've fallen out of the habit of doing over the years. I'm just curious as to why I expect to be able to write with any proficiency when I don't read the work of others at all. I read most of a book by Haruki Murakami several months ago--it was the first thing I'd read in a very long time and I felt inspired. But I didn't stick with it and it didn't spur in me a desire to start reading habitually again. I'm sort of wishing it had.