Traveling Writer & Revisiting Art

02:08 pm

Coding using vim bindings reminds me a lot of the days when I was trying to learn touch typing. I type slowly, I think a lot about what to press, when to press it and the already formed muscle memory keeps interrupting. But I’m hoping to get to an acceptable level of competence in probably 2 weeks of time. Let’s see.

04:46 pm

Supposing if I could be reborn and start this life all over again, I think I’d wanna be a traveling writer. Not necessarily rich in money, but rich in experiences and stories to tell. My worldly possessions could be contained in a backpack. Some clothes, a pair of shoes, sunglasses, a cap, a kindle, a camera and a laptop. I don’t think I’ll even want a mobile phone. Definitely not a smartphone. Where would I travel? What would I write about?

I still have to figure out my way of writing. How do I put together words and from them put together characters and their stories. Do I just keep on writing whatever comes to mind or do I create a mental structure of the whole story from start to end and then start fleshing it out. How do I make it feel natural? Organic? Witty? One thing which I remember Javid Akhtar saying in an interview is, before creating art you have to consume a lot of it. Well to be honest I have been reading almost all my life, but did I really “understand the depth” of the words I was reading. I’ve certainly become more observant about how writers structure their sentences, how they move in and out of plot points, and to be honest that makes me feel a bit low. I feel extremely small when I read these works.

I need consistency. I feel that’s the only thing which can help me in cracking this thing.

I was watching an interview of Karl Ove Knausgard where he talked about how he writes every single day about an object. Any object from his surroundings. A pen. A flower. A table. A commode. He does this just as a mental exercise. A sort of Kata for writing. And I think it’s fantastically good way to gain new perspectives about seemingly ordinary objects, which you can later on even use in your work and if not that at least it’ll train your mind to think from a different perspective about things.

06:40 pm

There’s a huge difference between revisiting works of great creators and revisiting your own works. In case of the former, you peel off a layer of meaning and beauty that you didn’t know was there before. And in case of the latter you find a new facet looking through which you realise that it stinks twice as much then previously thought.

I’ve always been fascinated by this (the first part of the statement above, not the second one). You watch a movie and it makes an impact on you which slowly fades away with time. Then years pass by, now a more mature, more understanding, more observant version of you again watches that movie and it hits you again but this time with punches that you didn’t know were there the first time. You notice the camera movement, the lighting, the framing of actors, their movement and what it all implies given the context of their characters and the overall story.

Could it be because the brain already remembers the giveaway facts of the movie and looks for something different each time? Or is it assigning meaning to things which even the creators of the movie didn’t intend?

Or could it be because that the creators did in fact worked that extra hard to put those details in there which they knew could only be noticed and more importantly absorbed on repeated viewings?