Meadering Thoughts of A Frustrated Writer Wannabe

I started this weblog in part to keep myself writing. It has been awhile since I’ve put any serious effort in my writing and sometimes I feel guilty about it. There was a time that I felt driven to write, to exorcise my inner demons out by the flow of my words. I’ve always seen my writing as therapeutic since I’m actually quite shy in person and would never be able to express myself freely. Through the anonymity of the Internet and the shield of this computer, I would always be able to let myself go with my writing without any barriers.

I mainly write fiction since it is what I’m most comfortable with. My writings would usually be dictated by how I feel at that particular moment. In a way, I invest a lot of emotions into my work which by the time I reach the end would totally drain me. Of course this means that when I read back things that I’ve wrote before, I keep thinking about what on earth would motivate me to write something like that. I remember one particular piece that I did in college that my lecturer actually commented as being “a bold but disturbing piece”. It was something about an abused multiple personality killer and was written in 2nd person POV as part of a conversation between him and the victim i.e. the reader. I wished that I still had that paper but I lost it when I brought my things back home after graduation.

My latest pride and joy is my very first English screenplay. I’ve been trying for ages to do one but I’ve never written anything in screenplay format before and had a lot to learn before I was confident enough to start. Once I started, I found out that I actually liked this format better since I get to let my imagination run wild while I wrote. Writing about stage directions and dialogue allowed me to visualize the story better and I found myself more careful about how I ground the story in the realm of what is possible within an imaginary budget. I also found myself thinking about the impact of every scene that I write and how it impacts the pacing of the “movie” that I had playing in my head. It took me a few weeks of 2 hours block of writing before I completed a full feature length screenplay. BTW … the screenplay I wrote was an unauthorized sequel to “Beautiful Thing” by Jonathan Harvey. It was more of a fan-fiction project that went a wee bit overboard.

Of course being able to write doesn’t mean I write well. I’m terrible with grammar and could never pick those mistakes out when I’m editing. I guess that’s why it is always better to share one’s writing with others.