Jamie, for instance, has various distractions. He has a job as a Web Developer, which keeps him fairly occupied most of the day. And he has hobbies. As a music collector, he spends many hours listening to, buying, or downloading music (mostly the latter). These hours often spill into the workday as he swaps music with Liam, each unloading and reloading their iPods. At home, Jamie reads sporadically and often goes for a long run. Finally, as a holder of a BA in English, Jamie considered himself a writer (most English majors or BAs still believe that they are writers. Many truly are.). And as a writer, he believes he must keep writing, even if it's nothing but flexing and pointing, as his friend Kris put it.
Lately, though, Jamie's writing habits have been diluted. Attempts to write a poem are little more than drunken exercises in stream of consciousness. So Jamie decided to start a blog and write in it each night. The simple act of typing, he hoped, would coax the words to become something more than text.
As Jamie sat down to write this evening, his phone buzzed with a message. It was from his brother, John, who lives in Invercargill. "Just got my own copy of World of Warcraft. Wanna play?"
Shit, Jamie thought. So much for tonight's blog.
2 comments:
A valiant exercise. I will be interested to see how/if this whole thing does juice up your writing skills (being writingly-challenged, I'll look for any tricks). Count yourself halfway lucky that as an English student, you're a "writer". As a linguist, I "do language". Whenever someone figures out what that entails, I'm the first who wants to know.
Perhaps we need to think of it in terms of adult movies. English students are the clammy haired boils holed up in motel rooms writing letters to Hustler. Linguists are the porn stars. Writers tend to think they're suffering, when all they want to be is fucking on.
Hope this helps! ;-)
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