Week 3: Pitching + The Prestige
My best friend slept over on the weekend and we watched The Prestige.
I ended up crying at the end because of the dark and scary bits. My best friend had to hold me and hug me. After he fell asleep, I was too scared to fall asleep. I had to distract myself with Reddit and Instagram until I started thinking about other things and not people getting their fingers chopped up and drowning.
We tried to watch Whiplash together a few months ago. I couldn't get through the first half an hour because it was too intense.
The next morning, I realised I do like The Prestige. I liked talking about it, discussing what happened, how messed up the characters were.
Alex posted on Facebook that he had been published in RMIT's Catalyst magazine. I saw it and thought: hey, why don't I do that?
I pitched a piece I wrote for Theories last sem which was my mistake. Somewhere in the background conversations of this degree I have heard that it is not a good idea to pitch something you've already written, because they might want you to take it in a different direction or ask you to add or change something.
Well, I know that now. My pitch was accepted but my word count was only 500-700.
I didn't want to cut that piece down. I loved it how it was. But I didn't know how I could write a new one without feeling like I was copying myself or feeling dishonest, especially because the original piece was autofictional and written very 'in the moment'.
I tried to replicate it and take a more fictional approach, making up events. Just the initial plan came out wrong.
Eventually, I sat down in my break and plotted out something new. Something 'in the moment' for me, where I was a writer, right now.
It worked. I have a piece that feels new, feels fresh, feels like me. And I'm proud of it.
And so this week I realised: I can't write if I'm lying.
I am only now realising that it's already Week 3 and I haven't started my bird essay. I've read barely 50 pages of The Genius of Birds, my first research text.
I have lots of ideas--encounters I've had with birds, fragments I can juxtapose with those from my real life to create meaning. And then I realised I don't really have any real life fragments. The essay has no emotional substance.
To me, emotion is the reason I write. I have something to get off my chest, I have to figure something out, I have to say something.
That's what I wrote on my application to this course, three years ago now. I wrote that I write because I feel a need to say something.
But right now, I don't have anything to say.
Sometimes my friend says to me: 'I want more drama in my life.'
I never related to that before. I do now.
I keep going to write down an idea for a scene and thinking: No, I can't use that, that scene's in Yarn Over. And then I start to get sad--is my life boring now? why don't I have anything to write about? have i run out of ideas?
It's the day after I wrote the rest of this blog post (so Thursday). I'm busy Friday to Sunday and I need to send in a bird essay draft for workshopping by Sunday noon.
I'm lost.
I spent two hours eating and procrastinating, one hour searching through Wingspan bird cards (which was pretty fun, if not super helpful), half an hour watching bird videos and 'portraits' on YouTube, and the other half hour staring at this one page of my Scrivener, just the beginning tiny fragment of my piece. It's titled: 'Different Types of Nests'.
I'm always intimidated by beginnings but I'm incredibly intimidated by this one. Somehow, I feel like I've done too much research and not enough research.
In the first week, I worried if doing research might detract from my authentic and subjective voice and now I feel like it might be. But at the same time, I worry that I'm going more off conjecture than actual research and I'll get to class and someone will inform me that the nests are all a lie.
I have to drop off my brother's school uniform soon. And I'm visiting my older cousins tonight. Hopefully I can actually get at least 1000 words of this essay done sometime today.
I ended up crying at the end because of the dark and scary bits. My best friend had to hold me and hug me. After he fell asleep, I was too scared to fall asleep. I had to distract myself with Reddit and Instagram until I started thinking about other things and not people getting their fingers chopped up and drowning.
We tried to watch Whiplash together a few months ago. I couldn't get through the first half an hour because it was too intense.
The next morning, I realised I do like The Prestige. I liked talking about it, discussing what happened, how messed up the characters were.
*
Alex posted on Facebook that he had been published in RMIT's Catalyst magazine. I saw it and thought: hey, why don't I do that?
I pitched a piece I wrote for Theories last sem which was my mistake. Somewhere in the background conversations of this degree I have heard that it is not a good idea to pitch something you've already written, because they might want you to take it in a different direction or ask you to add or change something.
Well, I know that now. My pitch was accepted but my word count was only 500-700.
I didn't want to cut that piece down. I loved it how it was. But I didn't know how I could write a new one without feeling like I was copying myself or feeling dishonest, especially because the original piece was autofictional and written very 'in the moment'.
I tried to replicate it and take a more fictional approach, making up events. Just the initial plan came out wrong.
Eventually, I sat down in my break and plotted out something new. Something 'in the moment' for me, where I was a writer, right now.
It worked. I have a piece that feels new, feels fresh, feels like me. And I'm proud of it.
And so this week I realised: I can't write if I'm lying.
*
I am only now realising that it's already Week 3 and I haven't started my bird essay. I've read barely 50 pages of The Genius of Birds, my first research text.
I have lots of ideas--encounters I've had with birds, fragments I can juxtapose with those from my real life to create meaning. And then I realised I don't really have any real life fragments. The essay has no emotional substance.
To me, emotion is the reason I write. I have something to get off my chest, I have to figure something out, I have to say something.
That's what I wrote on my application to this course, three years ago now. I wrote that I write because I feel a need to say something.
But right now, I don't have anything to say.
Sometimes my friend says to me: 'I want more drama in my life.'
I never related to that before. I do now.
I keep going to write down an idea for a scene and thinking: No, I can't use that, that scene's in Yarn Over. And then I start to get sad--is my life boring now? why don't I have anything to write about? have i run out of ideas?
*
It's the day after I wrote the rest of this blog post (so Thursday). I'm busy Friday to Sunday and I need to send in a bird essay draft for workshopping by Sunday noon.
I'm lost.
I spent two hours eating and procrastinating, one hour searching through Wingspan bird cards (which was pretty fun, if not super helpful), half an hour watching bird videos and 'portraits' on YouTube, and the other half hour staring at this one page of my Scrivener, just the beginning tiny fragment of my piece. It's titled: 'Different Types of Nests'.
I'm always intimidated by beginnings but I'm incredibly intimidated by this one. Somehow, I feel like I've done too much research and not enough research.
In the first week, I worried if doing research might detract from my authentic and subjective voice and now I feel like it might be. But at the same time, I worry that I'm going more off conjecture than actual research and I'll get to class and someone will inform me that the nests are all a lie.
I have to drop off my brother's school uniform soon. And I'm visiting my older cousins tonight. Hopefully I can actually get at least 1000 words of this essay done sometime today.
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