Getting too attached

One problem I have with anything I do creatively is getting too attached.  It makes it very hard to do any editing and even harder to accept any criticism.  It's as if someone has turned to me and said "I don't like your child" even when it's me reviewing what I've done.  When I try to cut word count, oh dear that's a wrench, I find myself mentally apologising to the words that have to be wiped out.  It's perhaps an extension of my tendency to anthropomorphise everything.  It's hard for me to throw things away in the name of making space because the things have done nothing wrong and it's not their fault I have too many of them.  It's even worse if I've had a lot of contact with something that simply wears out, like a toothbrush.  Oh dear lord, the anguish when I have to replace something.

So I'm sitting here doing some editing on a short story which I don't think is short enough and I still have a fair bit to write at the end.  I'm going through it paragraph by paragraph reducing the word count and it's so hard.  Ok, some sentences I look at and think that's awful and make quick work of cutting them up.  But some of them, there's an unhealthy attachment.  It's not as though by taking them out of something I've written that I'm expunging them from the English language.  They still exist whether they're on my page or not.  Why do I feel bad for them?  Why does it hurt me to delete a word or two or worse replace them with something simpler?  I mean, does a surgeon break his heart for every appendix he removes, or a dentist for every tooth pulled?  I'm a (reasonably) sane and rational person and I freely admit this is far from sensible behaviour.

But how nuts am I really?  I remember it was with some relief that I read Arthur Conan Doyle about writing.  He said that Walter Scott would often write and then look back over his work and not recognise a bit of it.  When he wrote it was as though he dictated what a voice outside of himself had told him.  I've always said that myself and generally people just look at me funny and nod.  The story writes itself using my hands and eyes.  I just channel it onto the paper.  Sometimes, if I don't sit down to it, the voice takes a huff and stops telling me the story.  I'm wondering whether because this happens to me, this curious mental process, when I edit part of me feels like I'm carving up something someone else has done.  Is that why I feel so apologetic when I reword things or cut chunks out?  Am I offending a muse that I can't see but can hear?  A muse is a celestial being though and I always imagine them as sweetness and light where what I write is usually quite dark and often brutal.  Is it a muse or a demon that writes through me or is it some detached part of my own psyche that I'm still afraid to offend?  I don't want it to stop speaking to me, whatever it is.


Whether it's a misplaced anthropomorphism, a muse, a demon, or just a part of me, I'm definitely too attached to what I create.  Will that make me too worried to send it out into the world to be ripped apart and disparaged by anyone who feels like it?  I hope not.  Perhaps it's time to let my brain-children make their own way in the world while I wait for them to let me know how they're getting on.  There I go anthropomorphising again.  They are not alive, Juliet, stop getting so attached!

Celebrating stupid

I was going to tweet something along the lines of "Thank you Internet, thank you stupid people! Another novel idea is born".  Then I thought what if everyone thought I was referring to them, because social media has that bizarre effect.  I posted song lyrics on facebook once and everyone thought I was having a nervous breakdown.  Everything gets twisted and taken personally.  I used to post cryptic status updates so only those in the know would get the message then others started responding based on their own very misguided interpretations.  You can lock individual updates down now so code is no longer necessary.

Anyway, that wasn't the point.  The point is you can sit there torturing yourself over inability to come up with a new storyline when really, if you spend ten minutes online, there's a wealth of them sitting there waiting to be picked up.  Grab your local paper and read the small, obscure stories and let your imagination run wild.

I guess I get the 'invent a back-story' thing from my Mum.  She was always looking for reasons for the strangest of things.  "Ee, I wonder why that is" or "What did he do that for? Isn't it weird" were just a couple of her catchphrases.  I wish she'd had the confidence to write what she was wondering.  There would have been some great fiction spun from a shoe in the middle of the road or the clouds making a peculiar shape one morning.  The difference between Mum and me is that I had her as a Mum.  Thanks Mum.

So I've had a great bolt of inspiration striking me out of the blue this morning just looking at a ridiculous news story online that would never have come about in itself without stupid people.  I mean people with a severe and potentially fatal lack of common sense, not people as a whole as in stupid weather, stupid traffic.  People in general are not quite as stupid as those spectacular few who lull you into a false sense of security by surviving into adulthood then do something monumentally stupid.  Those people.  You know the ones.  They do things like light a match to check for a gas leak.  There are so many ways I could go with this idea that it might become a whole tribe of offspring from one apparently hermaphroditic thought.  Really should blog off and jot some notes down!

Easily distracted?

There are many things that distract me when I sit down to write.  Sometimes it's the cat harassing me for food even when there's still plenty in her bowl.  If you've read Journal of a Cat of Leisure, you might have some idea of how exacting she can be.

It's rarely the phone - I just don't give my number out preferring to email - I like it quiet.  When someone does phone, it's either a cold call that's somehow managed to get past the telephone preference service, or one of very few people.  If it's the former, it drags me out of the 'zone' and although it takes no time to end the call, regaining momentum can take time.  If it's the latter then it might be a while before I get back to my train of thought.

It's rarely the TV.  Generally I have no idea what's on in the background until something really loud happens.  There are few shows I actually sit and watch.  If it's something like Jerry Springer, which occasionally sneaks up in the schedule without me noticing (and I really should be in bed by then anyway), there's a reflex response of channel changing before the screaming begins but it's reflex and doesn't alter my pattern.  Occasionally I hear a random sentence that makes my ears prick up and I end up saying something on facebook or tweeting.

There's the worst distraction though, and upon reflection I admit, I might be just a little bit OCD.  When I start up my laptop, I like to have my programs in a certain order on the taskbar so that I can switch between them without scanning through them.  I get most upset when Windows decides to rearrange everything without asking me.  I'm so particular about it, it applies not only to the applications in the taskbar but also to the tabs in the browser and the order I open documents, so when stacked I know which is which.  Right  now, I have 9 applications running, one of which has 7 stacked documents and I don't have to distract myself to refer between any of them.  Sad, right?  The distraction is the browser in the taskbar.  If the last page I viewed was a social media page, it stays on top and the number of new notifications or tweets or messages appears there, ticking up and up.  It draws my eye whenever it changes and I invariably end up looking at what's waiting.

Now, here's where the OCD thing comes out.  Why not just close my browser or view one of the other pages last?  I can't.  If the browser is not the second from left application on the bar, I can't work.  If I can't see the ticking numbers, I worry that when I do look there'll be a hundred and it'll take ages to check.  This doesn't happen when I'm doing my day job from home.  I have a different order of programs and a different set of pages, but it ties to a different mindset.  At the office, the desk has to be laid out a certain way before I even start opening programs.  I've looked at neurolinguistic programming to help me figure out my odd behaviours and it seems to be something I've done from childhood.  The pencil case in a specific place on the school desk, and I could never concentrate without a pen in my hand.

So really, is the distraction social media, or is it my own psychological programming?  Writing this blog in itself has dragged me away from what I was writing before this and I'm only writing this blog because I was being distracted by the number of tweets going up.  Maybe I should do something completely unrelated for a while!