🌑 thom can't sleep 🌕

Things have been looking up, essentially ever since I wrote that last post.

Bizarrely, the spirometry clinic that my local practice kept promising would open eventually did open two or three days after. I got a doctors appointment to re-evaluate my options which was the most in-depth that I had ever had. The conclusion of the meeting was that I very probably have either asthma that has never been diagnosed or an unusual condition where acid reflux goes into my lungs and not my stomach which can cause scarring on my lungs. This sounds serious and scary but is apparently just solved with a course of antacids.

It's been looking up ever since and mainly because I know that the cliff of poor health isn't as far a fall as I once thought. I don't want to say I'm a hypochondriac but I feel like my unexplained episodes of struggling to breath being a cause for concern on my life. They have been becoming more frequent and worse and longer so I just felt that eventually my lungs would become unbreathable.

But it looks like I'm not gonna die.

Like most people with medical issues who cannot afford to go for private healthcare, I just have to sit and play the waiting game and I'm luckier than most who are on waiting lists for way more severe surgeries and life-saving operations who are left in the dark.

I'm optimistic for what is on the other side of the road and being diagnosed with whatever it is so I can learn how to manage whatever it is and get my physical and mental health back on track. I am the heaviest that I have ever been and the most out of shape and out of practice that I have ever been.

I've been suffering with an as yet unidentified breathing problem since last July and it's been steadily getting worse and worse ever since to the point where I, an active young person, now requires assistance at my place of work due to the manual labour involved. At the time of writing, I have been waiting for the results of an echo scan on my heart for around nine weeks and I have been waiting to be given a spirometry test appointment.

I feel like I have not been taken seriously by anyone at every turn and have seriously considered the possibility that one day, I am just going to die whatever is eating away at me.

So I've decided to write more and document my thoughts more because I can't afford a solicitor and this is the next best thing.

Breathing Problem

Basically, every so often, throughout the day and throughout the week, breathing becomes quite difficult to the point of feeling like I need to take a big, deep breath and I cannot take one. It seems to happen suddenly and with no rhyme or reason. For the past couple of months, I have decided to cut certain things out of my diet to see if I am allergic reaction to anything that makes my lungs close up. So far, nothing seems to make anything better or worse.

So far, I've had an X-Ray that yielded nothing, several blood tests and ECGs that yielded nothing and an echoscan that, prior to the cardiologist sending me away, said everything looked fine.

It's worse that, ever since I've developed this problem, my sleep has been way worse and it was bad anyway as I suffer with night terrors occasionally so sleeping can be offputting at the best of times.

It sounds like I am complaining but this has slowly and systematically ruined my life. I can't exercise anymore because my chest tightens up, i can't concentrate on anything productive because I feel like I have to take deep breaths constantly and as a result, I have become miserable and devoid of any energy.

Out of Options

I feel like its tantamount to the lack of urgency and care by any and all doctors that I've seen that nobody is taking me seriously and I feel like I'll die one day without anyone finding out what it is. I don't want to die nor do I want to kill myself. I'm not and haven't been suicidal in a few years. I just want this to be over and I've never been closer to visiting a private doctor with the issue because at this point, I'd break the bank and pay any money to fix this.

I woke up especially late today and discovered that Professor Benjamin Zephaniah had died following an ongoing battle with a brain tumour and it wasn't sadness I felt, it was shame. And it hasn't been the first time.

Benjamin Zephaniah has a strange, almost subliminal effect on my mind and possibly the collective consciousness. I don't think about his impact on my life and my creative upbringing and how he was integral to both until he finds his way back into my conscious through kismet. Then I realize what he has done for me in that moment and only that moment.

One time semi-recently, I was rooting through old, wrinkled books in my parents' room to decide what to keep and what to give away. Whatever exact books you are envisioning in your mind right now - let me tell you they were all there. Rankin, Patterson, Gerritsen but not just Sunday Times Bestsellers; C.S Lewis and Roald Dahl featured heavily from my parents' distant past as well.

There was another book that I don't remember owning but was apparently mine. I remember reading it in Year 8 English Lit but never buying it. It was a play called Face by Benjamin Zephaniah, a cautionary tale of how the reputation of a popular boy in school declines due to an accident that disfigures his face despite being essentially the same person.

It is disappointing to report to you, the reader, that my class did not like this play and it not being officially on the curriculum, it was sacked off. What I did as a 12 year old boy was knock one of the class copies of the book to read it in my own time. It was deeply interesting to me on a subconscious level because I grew up with people not liking me and not understanding exactly why.

I had forgotten all about this though and it's only sitting here now and remembering the several instances where my paths had crossed with Benjamin Zephaniah's work. Year 8 (8th Grade) was a tumultuous and impressionable time for me as I was at a crossroads between falling in with a bad crowd or concentrating on my love of books and writing and it's bizarre that that is the trade-off but societally, it is in school. If I hadn't read that play of my own volition, fuck knows what might have happened to me.

I'll share one more story.

Courtesy of De Montfort University

At my university, we had a surprise visit from the man himself where we were all made aware just a week in advance and excitement and tension shot through my veins. The only feeling I think I can compare it to is the combination of giddiness and dread thst cultivates in your stomach before you have your first kiss. It was a 10am lecture which I frequently struggled to get out of bed in the morning for. I was having difficult times in my social life and was suffering with anxious and depressive feelings a lot of the time. Knots and dread every morning. On that day, I was on campus two hours in advance.

I remember waiting in the lobby outside the theater for what felt like a lifetime and getting cold feet. I wanted to head back just because something in my head told me I was undeserving of being there. I don't know why those feelings existed in me but it's probably because I didn't have any questions for him, any books for him to sign and I was too scared to ask for a photo. I regretfully ended up having no interaction with him whatsoever.

As for his talk, he was as great as you'd expect him to be. He talked wondrously about his life story, the background of some of his most iconic poems as well as some perhaps lesser known tidbits but my main takeaway was how humble he was; putting himself below everyone in the room because he has zero academic achievement in his field. If nothing else, its indictive of the false credibility of the mechanics of academia. Especially after he had told us all of world experiences that would make your teeth itch.

From the official social media of Benjamin Zephaniah

And today, like every other time Benjamin Zephaniah has entered my conscious, it has been at a crossroads in my life where I struggle to sleep and wake up for my night job. It has been at a time when there have been doubts on my mind about my creative ability, where I'm going in my writing career and even if I will have one. I woke up to discover Benjamin Zephaniah had passed away and before I knew it, I was reading and watching everything that he had ever done.

And once again, I remember why I do this. Why I love this and why I want to achieve big things through prose and poetry. My will to not leave behind my dreams and accept consumption by the zeitgeist. Especially, in attitudes to how art is commercialized and capitalized in our modern world. Zephaniah preached absolute creative freedom. Anarchy in writing. He never shut up for anyone. He told the absolute truth and told it beautifully, no matter how stark the reality is.

Thanks to him, I will not throw this away.

I felt compelled to write this because I feel that the view on this praxis is slightly warped. Differing approximations include "Writing what you know explains why so much literature is about boring privileged men" and "My life is boring, why would I write about it?" and my personal gripe: "Why would I write about what I know? It's limiting."

It's important to me because said warped view is routed in self-consciousness. Something that I'm a big fan of pushing in writers is alienating the self-doubt in your head. It isn't about creativity or the lack thereof, it's about realizing that you have more ideas than you think.

My Own Case

I know this because I am a victim of it too. I want to be absolutely perfect and non-copying. Nothing I make can be similar to anything ever made previously. Everything has to be new, fresh and original in the truest sense of the world. This has followed me for years because I would come up with something I thought was my own idea but then I would see my idea in another popular piece of media and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

This is, of course, bogus. You can't live your creative life like that. It just isn't feasible. The reality is that I'm self-conscious and paranoid about people saying something like "Well, it's just like X except there is Y and there isn't Z" which is projection. I think that about other things because I have literary brainworms. I am so enraptured by the study of story beats and the composition that it's hard not to view everything so nakedly. It's reductionist.

What Does This Have To Do With Anything?

I am saying, in a roundabout way, that writing about what I know is not good enough. I do not trust or rely on my own ability to turn up with the goods. This is demonstrated by the fact there are nine finished drafts on this account that I will not publish because I don't think that they are good enough. But here's the thing: They might not actually be good enough.

But failure is a part of the process and me, not publishing any of it, is a fear of failure and, therefore, a fear of progression.

TL;DR: I too have notions of self-doubt in my creativity.

I know right? The great thomcantsleep with <100 followers who you have never heard of in your life

Write About What You Know... What Do I Know?

My life experience is this:

I have autism spectrum disorder.

I come from a working class home:- A self-employed father and a mother who always worked in bars or factories.

I'm Scottish but living in England.

I'm bisexual and introverted.

I have wrestled with anxiousness and paranoia.

I have a social trauma due to being raised by the internet.

What the fuck is that? That's nothing. Writing about what you know is bad. That's not that far away from me! I have depression too! Boring!

Here Is Why You're Wrong

Funny thing about inspiration is that it is always there in our brain. We just have to realize that it's there with other stimuli. The paradigm "Write What You Know" isn't inspirational. It's a building block for a world or a character. How would that world react to that character? How would that character react to that world?

Every main character that I've ever written has been autistic, shy and has some kind of social trauma. Limiting? No because the settings have all been vastly different and, as a result, the stories have all been different. This is where the self-anaylsis ends before I enter masturbatory territory.

A Case Study: Khaled Hosseini

It has been zero hours since I mentioned Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner.

If you don't know, Khaled Hosseini grew up during a transitional period for Afghanistan so a vast amount of his books surround Afghanistan past, present and future. The Afghan identity is commentated on as a culture in how it interacts particularly with Western culture. He often delves into the many perceptions of the country and how they've changed, weaving in tragedy that is semi-autobiographical. The Kite Runner is a great example of this.

It depicts the rapid decline of Afghanistan due to political intervention from Russia and the United States and analyses the class structure and how that in itself has changed. Hosseini is quoted as feeling "survivor's guilt" as he was able to seek asylum during these interventions.

Now... I am not suggesting you have yourself a tragic upbringing because it will be interesting to write about. I am suggesting that your upbringing is more interesting than you might think and that you are thinking about it too closely. Hosseini didn't publish The Kite Runner until he was 38 years old so it would be safe to say he has seen A LOT of shit before putting his foot on the gas. I am not saying you wait until then to start either.

Start off in a smaller way.

The Root of the Problem...

There are two explanations at play here:

You apply too much weight to the phrase "Write What You Know": It's not meant to be taken as "You should write your own biography about your life down to the last detail" - What if you lead this life except something happened differently? Who would that person be?

We end where we start - self-doubt and a resistance to it. "Limiting" and "Boring" and the first quote I used (which is just plain wrong). The only limiter to your own project as a creative person is yourself. You are beating yourself up in thinking the story you have inside you isn't interesting and not worthy of putting pen to paper.

If you don't end up putting pen to paper, you'll experience the fear of failure that I detailed halfway through the article where I nearly lost you with my rambling.

Addressing Creative Resistance

There is only one way: Write.

The problem with all these cheesy paradigms and soundbites is that they are true. You have to allow yourself to make something. Even if it objectively fucking sucks, YOU HAVE TO DO IT. You can't make something and expect it to be good straight away. WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU KNOW.

FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT.

They say that you can’t teach writing and they’re probably right. What I believe is that there are definitely ways to get better and improve your craft. Certain things are absolutely necessary to progress and improve as a writer - no matter what the skill level is.

I’ve got a few things here and there that aren’t trade secrets but more good advice for moving forward with your writing.

1. Put Pen to Paper.

You don’t know what you’re like at writing if you don’t try at least once. The important thing about giving it a go is that if you won’t know where to start if you don’t start at all. You may think that you’re terrible at writing or that you’re God’s gift to the medium but you have to produce something - and I mean anything - to get started. Think of it as taking a preliminary test for a college to get a handle on your skill level. See my blog about writing exercises if you need any help. :)

2. Get Help (and Allow Yourself to Be Helped).

It seems incredibly obvious considering what the subject of this article is but what is fundamental to learning the art of writing is that you have to know how to get help, where to get help from and how to apply it to your work. What I should point out at this juncture is that you should never hand out money to people who are offering to read your work. Most literary agents would happily read your work for free.

But it doesn’t have to be a literary agent. Just get someone who you trust to tell you the truth and be honest. Preferably, get a reader to critique your work like they would for a book from a bookshop. The more important aspect is psychological. You have to learn how to take criticism on the chin and not take it personally. Understand that whoever is giving you constructive critcism has your best interests in mind. What is constructive criticism? Simple. The want for your work to be more effective and when that want is asked for. Not unprompted put-downs in preference of what the critic wants.

Be prepared to take the advice and make the changes to your work. You may see it as a damage to your work and you may even not end up with that in your final edit but cycling through the chunks of info will help you find your way - what is good and what isn’t.

3. Read.

I’ll keep putting it in writing articles until I’m blue in the face but you have to read. If not read, take in any media - painted art, television, cinema, music - and think about it creatively; how was it put together and how it works as a piece of media. Take in the story, the composition, the structure, the dialogue and the syntax. What you learned in English Literature at school is useful in these scenarios because of the problem-solving skills it teaches you. When you understand what makes something quintessentially good. What, exactly, absorbs you in the product?

When you know the answer, it will make you a better writer. Think about art like a philosopher thinks about life or how a psychologist thinks about the mind.

4. Make Use of Your Notebook (or memo app on your phone).

Plan. Write down story ideas (they won’t stay in your head forever). Keep tabs on your progress and if someone tells you helpful advice or if you read a pertinent quote online, write it down. Be economical and try not to fill your notebook with random circled words out of context or underlined dates for no reason. It isn’t enough to just cosplay as a writer because you actually have to be one if you want to be good at it. This piece of advice is only small but it’s practical and a good notebook can put in the hard yards to make you work-hours more efficient in the long run.

5. Engage Your Imagination.

The word learning might sound tedious to you because it probably reminds you of a time in your life where you were depressed, bored, lost or just generally having a bad time of it. The truth is though that the best writers at the top of their game with nothing left to prove are still learning. You have to think about the process of writing without an academic mindset so you get the best out of yourself.

I did go to university and it must be said that it didn’t necessarily teach me how to write but taught me how to be better. I didn’t take a fancy to writing in school because they don’t really teach it and the subject of “creative writing” isn’t defined by 2+2. It’s closer to crafting a sum with two numbers you’ve invented yourself. I may be rambling but my point is this: engaging your imagination is learning how to write.

6. Read Your Own Work Aloud to Yourself.

This is very hard. It’s difficult but very, very necessary. You have to read what you’ve written out loud to yourself so you can see how it sounds.  See if you’re out of breath at the end of sentences and if full-stops (periods) and commas are in the places that they should be. You have to believe me when I say that reading in your head is a completely different sensation.

You’ll even discover certain adjectives and nouns don’t roll of the tongue the way you think they do in your head. There is a certain beat and rhythm to writing that you won’t discover without properly dictating it out loud. As a little bonus, you could unearth grammar and spelling mistakes dotted around here and there. That brings me on to my next and final point.

7. Master The Basics.

Okay, this is the only hard-nosed point that I have to make so I left it at the end.

This isn’t even something that you need a degree for. You just have to know how to use Google and utilize it for incredibly accessible knowledge about language and how it is constructed. Grammar, punctuation, sentence structure - all that really boring stuff that you learned really early on. If you didn’t pursue the subject of English Language (or the respective national language class in your country) in further education because of whatever reason, you will lose that basic knowledge.

If you use a word and you ask yourself what it means and your brain doesn’t have a proper answer, look it up. Always double-check that a word means exactly what you think it means. You can’t just guess or go from memory unless you are positively sure. Don’t allow yourself to be caught out and, by using Google more and more, it will stick in your head. For example, I used the word quintessentially in this article earlier. I looked up both what it means and how to spell it. I was 95% sure but that isn’t enough. If you don’t know where the apostrophe goes in a sentence, I am begging you to look it up. There is no shame in not knowing and using a search engine takes ten seconds max.

Some would say that it’s the hardest part of the whole affair. How to actually put pen to paper and begin somewhere - to take the first step in a long walk. It is difficult but it doesn’t have to be and something that I’ve learned from my time at university is that ultimately it’s up to you to put your foot on the accelerator.

What can prove useful is taking writing exercises just to get you started. Here are some of my favourites.

1. “I Remember...”

This is a timed one and I recommend giving yourself fifteen minutes but you can go as high as thirty if I you feel you need it. Essentially, you picture a place or a time in your personal life - it could be just a particular season or a year or even your whole childhood - and start every sentence with “I remember” just to see what comes to mind. What is important to remember is that a lot of writing is based on personal experience whether we like it or not and tackling your own upbringing artistically could bring the best out of you.

The important caveat about this writing exercise is to not stop if you can help it. Write on impulse. Whatever comes to mind about say, when you were fourteen years old, get it written down. You never know which direction you could end up going in. You may be telling yourself that your life isn’t that interesting but you’d be surprised what you can recall and the poetry that comes with it. Think about the senses, thoughts and feelings that would be going through your mind at the time.

This exercise is for testing your descriptive ability.

2. Photo/Music/Object Prompts.

Grant Wood - “American Gothic”

This one is pretty free-form. Look at any image - preferably a painting - of landscaped scenery or of abstract art and see what comes to mind. You may think it’s simple, too easy or even limiting but the point about utilizing visual prompts is that you can always fall back on them. The best ideas are always happened upon accidentally. You may find that your mind is exploring a facet of life previously uncharted in your brain.

My favourite kind of prompt - music - can be incredibly provocative. This is especially true if it’s a genre or category of music that you aren’t necessarily familiar with. Whatever your preferred way of streaming music is, look through genre mixes, radios or playlists of stuff that you’re maybe only vaguely familiar with and just let it play. Close your eyes. Picture the music. Picture the story it’s telling. Put yourself in a new world.

You could even take a physical object and study it for a while. Think of a story for it. It might be a weird esoteric knick-knack or a statue that your mother has hung on to for 45 years for no good reason. What do you feel when you look at it? What goes through your mind? Where could it come from? You could even go to a place near you and engage that same creative mindset.

The possibilities are literally endless.

3. One-Word Prompts.

Specifically, limit yourself and see what comes out. For example, you have to start a one-page short story that starts with the sentence “The trees were made of gold”. Have a couple of attempts and see what happens. There are websites, Twitter accounts and probably even Tumblrs that generate prompts and challenges.

You could decide to write a short story with a certain title like a single word. Base the entire story around that word. This, of course, all counts for poetry or even if you’re doing a diary or a journal entry. The primary function is to get your mind thinking unilaterally about writing and how you approach it. Make something out of what is supposedly nothing.

4. Short As Possible (The Shape of Stories by Kurt Vonnegut)

This is more of an editing exercise and a practice in story-structuring. Take a pre-existing story, either one you have written or one by someone else, and make it as short as possible. Cut it down to the absolute basics and by doing this, you excavate the bones. You know what is important and what isn’t. In a way, it’s like planning posthumously.

To help me explain this, I’m going to use a favourite of mine: Kurt Vonnegut’s The Shape of Stories

Image Courtesy of OpenCulture.com

Vonnegut uses a chart system to explain how certain stories are shaped based around the fortunes of the protagonist. Higher on the wavelength equals better fortunes and lower equals worse and he points out that contrary to the proverb, things often get better before they get worse. But other types of stories follow different patterns with different events marked on each peak and trough to underline the great shape that stories all take. When you understand this, you are able to know the important events, why they happen and when they happen.

The point of this is to get a handle on what direction you’re going in your story when you cut everything down to basics. When you know what events are the important ones and what they do for your story, it can do wonders for your long term ability to draft a story.

...If that makes sense.

5. Don’t Write If You Don’t Feel Like It

This one is going to blow your mind.

If you’re sitting there, staring bare-faced at the paper with nothing coming out, banging the keyboard with frustration, I’ll illuminate you. Just stop.

Get up and turn away from the keyboard. Close the lid or shut the notebook. Put your work away and go and do something else with your time. Distract yourself. Watch a new TV show or a film. Go out for a walk. Read a book. Do anything else because one thing that you aren’t going to do in those moments of fierce writer’s block is write. Allow yourself a break and put your mind at rest for a bit because when you come back, you’ll be more ready to tackle your work. It’s an exercise because it’s a psychological difficulty to give yourself a break if you’re a creative individual. Time always hangs heavy on your hands but only if you let it.

I’ve recently finished my Master’s course for Creative Writing. In fact, I handed in my dissertation at the start of the month, sealing off the educational period of my life possibly for good. I can’t say I learned a lot about being a writer but what I will say is that you pick up a great deal of extremely useful tidbits. The artistic university experience is food for thought and not sustenance for the starved. You’ll be plodding along for a few weeks and thinking that what you’re doing is a waste of time and then, suddenly, you’ll be presented with something that could massage your brains in a way that you weren’t expecting. It might be an experimental poem with a bizarre format or it could be an entirely new form of writing that you’d never heard of before.

Casper David Friedrich - “The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”

The one thing you won’t find at university (from my experience) is how to actually do the writing bit. There is a lot of debate about whether or not you can even teach it as a subject at all which is an argument you’ll probably never hear the end of. I certainly won’t be able to teach you either but, like music theory, there’s some pathways to the craft that open your brain a lot more to the process.

1. Less is More.

Sounds like a pretty old adage but it’s one of the most useful attitudes when it comes to what is called a “writing economy”. You have to be economical. Any artist in any avenue will sympathize with the compulsion to always add more to a piece of work when you should be taking more out. If you can get the same feelings out in less words, than do so. One of Matt Groening’s directing philosophies behind The Simpsons is being as funny as possible in as little words as possible - even if that means no words at all.

Obviously, there’s a limit to this philosophy that you’ll quickly get to grips with. It’s like changing gears in a car. You have to know when is the write time for what. Read it out to yourself. Is it too long? Are you running out of breath before the end of the sentence? The economy and quickness is also relative to the mood of the piece.

2. “Places need you to go to them“

Credit: u/dienaked

Setting can be easy to overlook if the centrepoint of whatever you’re writing about isn’t the setting. The place exists in your head but you need to let the reader go there and feel what you feel. Use the senses. Think about the possible small fixtures of the room and what they would add if you let the reader in. Like the last point, there isn’t a need to be meticulous because you have to allow the reader’s imagination to imagine.

If you’re thinking about an entire town, my go-to would be Derry in Stephen King’s IT. As you can see from the fanart (u/dienaked on r/stephenking) is that the world is so richly drawn that one is able to produce a map like this at all. I would recommend the book and the latest movie to take notes on how Stephen King makes more than just a backdrop.

3. Understand You’ll Make Mistakes.

An important lesson about making art is that failure is part of the process. Whilst I include the grim acceptance that you don’t have the Midas touch, I specifically mean that it takes a while to get it right. I forget about the first two points sometimes and get swept up in the hotbed of my own brain. It’s easily done. It actually took a few years of me being told those two things to fully get my head around what they properly mean.

I've probably made some mistakes in this very post.

You aren’t God’s gift to the medium; without fault and above judgement. I’ll pack into this point that it does help to get your work read by someone who will be honest with you. It doesn’t have to be a writing professional but someone who reads a moderate amount. Ask them for specific things you want feedback on like story, structure, form and themes.

4. Be Obsessed With Your Characters.

You have time. You don’t have to but it does help to get to know your characters as much as you can. What is their favourite food? Where were they born? What was their childhood like? It helps because it makes dialogue a whole lot easier to write and how they behave come off a lot more natural in your writing. You won’t find yourself arriving at a point where you would be asking yourself: What would they be like in this situation? How would they react?

I say again that you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. It is especially useful if you’re constructing a fantasy or sci-fi world or any kind of series.

5. You Actually Have to Read Books.

Joseph Heller - Catch 22

Yes. I’m sorry but you could really do with reading books fairly regularly. You can’t really get away with not doing it. I thought for the longest time that the books that I had read up to my point in university would be enough to carry me because I’m incredibly influenced by all of them. You get it into your head that you’ll be compared to all the great writers as unfavourably as possible but it just isn’t true.

I have even said to myself that I’ll just end up subconsciously “copying” whatever I’ve read which isn’t really true either. Essentially, if you’re a creative person, anything you will ever do will have some connection to something that you’ve absorbed previously. You can tell yourself that isn’t the case or come up with any excuse not to read. But you really should. Just pick up a book before bed and do half an hour, twenty minutes.

This is all aside from the other obvious benefits of reading.

6. Each Chapter is a Short Story.

Taking this philosophy in your structure will make writing a novel a whole lot easier. Plan out each chapter like a short story. Work out what the conclusion is and what will be the crux of the chapter. It will ease you into the habit of planning generally because you have to plan to some extent.

You’ll also find from taking this advice, you’ll be taking the entire process one step at a time and it could help those who feel bogged down by a project.

7. Be Ruthless.

The editing process is nearly more than half the writing process and you have to be ruthless with what you cut out. There will be times where you come up with something incredible. Your brain will come up with the goods unexpectedly but you have to pause for a moment and question if it really works with what you’re aiming for. If it isn’t then you have to be brave enough to delete it. Nothing stopping you from saving it for later though.

“When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.” —Stephen King

This also counts for any of the building blocks in your story. If something doesn’t work, you have to be prepared for the possibility of scrapping the lot. You can afford to let the cards collapse.

8. Do What You Like

This is the best one. The greatest thing about being an artist is that you can do what you like and go about it however you want. You are in control of your process and there are so many different methods to get your engine running. I implore that you experiment with all the incentives and prompts that you’ll easily find on the internet for free. Try stuff out and see what works. Personally, my favourite thing to do whilst writing is listening to music or ambience. There are thousands of playlists on Spotify that are specifically for writing/studying/whatever so why not give that a bash. On YouTube, you will not be able to get enough of 10-hour ambient noises that folk have made.

There will be always something that suits your mood and way of working. You just have to find it. Read how other writers go about their process because it won’t be a secret.

My final tip would be that you’re always learning all the time. I’m still learning how to do this Tumblr thing and how to put these kinds of articles together. Your job is to allow the information that you’re taking in to stick to you and put it to use.

Some Books I Would Recommend:

Jeff Vandermeer - Wonderbook

Stephen King - On Writing

Joseph Heller - Catch 22

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five

It's something that I've been dealing with since my teens not in a hyper-spiritual way or in a deeply troubled way but simply if I "qualified" or not. When questioning myself, I looked at gay and bisexual people who I knew and didn't see myself as one of them.

Anyone who has known me personally will know that I often changed my answer. Sometimes I might've said that "I thought about it and decided that men were gross" which was true. I do tend to think that men are generally gross and I frequently find that I am deeply unattracted to a large portion of them but that's besides the point. You are bought up to believe that being bisexual must mean that you are attracted to absolutely everybody or that the attraction levels are at least split straight down the middle - whatever that means.

From time to time, odd things would happen conversationally where I would have cause to question why I view the world slightly differently compared to other straight men that I knew. Things that go beyond your bog-standard man who wants to stay as far as possible away from his sexuality. I found that I was pretty comfortable with talking about men who I found attractive because I thought you can admit that without sacrficing the all-precious sanctity of heterosexuality. Again, I was bought up to assume that it meant 50/50. I would have a self-aware moment where I would ask myself: "Why am I so eager to know this sort of thing?" I wouldn't know the answer. There would be this cognitive dissonance where I would dismiss thoughts and ideas because they couldn't be true - I'm a straight man.

It's probably because I subconsciously sought the social normalization of bisexual discussion. Inertly, I must've thought this was normal. It's funny because me posting this is going to be a huge surprise. I've literally told no-one that I'm going to do this because perhaps, I want to force that social normalization by hook or by crook. To me, it isn't a big deal but it feels like I'm wrapping something up now. I'm bisexual. I just am.

What's been most illuminating and has stuck in the back of my mind ever since I read it on social media is that LGBTQIA+ people often find that they have to prove their sexuality or gender identity on a practical level or they aren't believed or validated by some. I, and many other bisexual men, may never ever enter an all-male relationship. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't go both ways either; heterosexual people are never questioned on their heterosexuality. Thinking about this has been a game changer.

The last thing I want is a big fuss and I suspect that is something that puts people off coming out. I don't think that I'm going to get booted out my house for this but I absolutely do expect that they will bore the bollocks off me with embarrassing watercooler chitchat for the next six months. I have not suffered in denial or in persecution. Nothing at all has actually changed other than that I will fill in forms slightly differently.

Once I hit that little blue button on the bottom right corner that says “Queue”, I probably won’t be able to sleep tonight and I will be constantly thinking about deleting this from my drafts because I’m not ready yet or that I’m still unsure.. I’m even thinking about hitting backspace on all of it as I type this sentence. I want to talk myself out of it. If nothing else, all these feelings prove it and verify it for myself.

I was overwhelmed over the weekend by the response to my post about my experience with autism. It’s the most notes that I’ve ever gotten on Tumblr before and it was only in a couple of days and I even got a couple of messages from people saying that they related to the experience which was especially very cool. It’s exactly what you want to see and hear when you write something like that because enabling other people to start a conversation about things like this is massively important to our society.

It all gave me precious happiness and serotonin that made me feel warm and fuzzy so thank you if you read it.

After talking about it a lot and letting everyone in my life know that I reached a milestone, I got a funny feeling. It felt like I was relishing in the numbers game instead of just being happy with what I had wrote and what I had said. Essentially, my ego was stroked which I don’t react well to. I don’t like feeling proud of something that I’ve done. I thought about the alternate universe where that post got no attention whatsoever and if I would feel the same way and the answer is definitely not. Whilst it was definitely great to hear other people’s stories and talk about the world of being diagnosed with ASD which is something that I’m very passionate about, I was happier with how much attention it was getting on comparison.

It made me feel like not a great person because I don’t really do this for attention. Part of the reason that I left Twitter was realizing that I was uncomfortable with the proverbial points system where you are rewarded with dopamine shots every time someone “likes” your post. I didn’t like that because it was fake happiness and you are effectively encouraged to achieve that fake happiness at any cost. That’s why people often pin their most “successful” tweet to the top of their profile like a trophy.

But this sensation that it was giving me was similar and I got those pleasure chemicals every time I checked Tumblr and I had a bunch of notification bubbles. I shouldn’t feel pleasure with the big number but rather, with the people reading it and relating to it.

The problem with me is that I’m not used to feeling proud of myself. I remember only really beginning to recieve compliments and atta-boys when I was in my mid-teens and I got a taste for it. Really, I should be happy with myself because I’m enough without needing props from exterior sources. Instead, I get lost in the feeling. With the assistance of the internet, I get carried away with myself. I’m far better now that I used to be because I learned to teach myself that I can have self-worth outside of all this.

It also isn’t helped by being autistic because I often don’t know what or how to feel about things. I have a detachment from happiness because whenever I do feel happy, I find it oddly embarrassing and I feel vulnerable when I smile. An off-shoot of this is that I wouldn’t know happiness if it slapped me in the face. I feel like I should have a voice lingering over me to tell me that this is supposed to be a happy point in my life and that I should feel happy. I feel weird about being proud as well.

I remember everyone around me being excited and interested in me publishing a book. I got heavily embarrassed and I feel embarrassed writing this now because it feels like a petulant humble brag for me to just randomly bring this up now. I just need some kind of example. People told me it was good and I felt happy with myself but it didn’t feel real because I didn’t achieve happiness myself through my own ends.

Which is of course, a ridiculous thing to say because I did achieve it myself. I spent a long time writing and working on something, making it good and then I published it. My work paid off because it got largely a good response. The funny thing is that if it got largely negative response, I would’ve thought that I deserved to feel like shit and I think that’s because it’s more comfortable and easy for my brain to assume that I am without worth and prosper. Happiness is unfamiliar. It feels risky and dangerous.

Perhaps, if we all embrace the happiness, we’ll then take the smooth with the rough and adjust to the serotonin levels in our body. If we don’t, then we won’t treasure happiness when we have it.

How we do that? I dunno.

It feels like it has been a very long time since something has came about that has been so universally acclaimed and it has grown on me more and more since my first viewing. At the time of writing this, I have seen it four times.

It’s funny because my initial praise seemed fairly pedestrian in that I enjoyed it because it struck the comfy place between base-level silliness and excavated deeper meaning. You can still enjoy this work of art if you take it for what it is but the iceberg is there if you want to take a deep dive underwater which is precisely what you want out of any art. But there, I’ve praised INSIDE for essentially being extremely competent at visual storytelling and thematic resonance as opposed to telling what those themes and story are. How themes of living with anxiety and depression, the blurred lines between the creative self and the human underneath the skin and aspects of self-awareness.

It also couldn’t have released at a better time or in a better way. It wasn’t hastily knocked together in prime pandemic hour when every production company was scrambling for some COVID-19 related media. It isn’t really about the pandemic either and I feel like he could’ve made this whenever and it would still touch and relate to people like it has. It’s just even more relatable to a lot more people. Personally, I think it’s a bit of a mistake to put this out in cinemas because it obviously isn’t crafted for a crowd of people. I feel like being in a massive theater full of other people would detract from the claustrophobic experience of watching it.

I can go on and on about how brilliant INSIDE was at achieving all this and more but I want to talk about the infectious creativity behind Burnham’s latest song-and-dance.

The term ‘home-made’ is synonymous with low-effort. Not anymore. Sure, it’s obvious that Bo Burnham’s equipment wasn’t bought in an alleyway and that it is bound to have cost an arm and a leg. But the point is that it could’ve been made with electronic equipment that Burnham found at the back of his shed and it still would’ve went down just as well. The power was in his all in his hands to make something exceptionally good and be in complete control of the output which is an abject rarity in this world. So he made what he wanted and had to answer to nobody - on paper anyway.

As an aside, something that I found frustrating was that everyone and their dog was trying to get ahold of him for an interview about it or a podcast or whatever when, I really don’t want to know behind the scenes or the thought process. It’s not something we should want to know. It would be like asking Salvador Dali what he was thinking when he turned the urinal on it’s side and signed it with a fake name. That may sound a little pretentious but it’s true that once he tells you, some of the magic has gone. You should want the magician to baffle you.

Anyway, it’s clear Bo Burnham is writing about himself whilst simultaneously expressing a self-consciousness about how he is percieved by himself versus the perception of others. This is especially present in the reaction scene where Bo Burnham reacts to himself reacting to himself reacting to himself reacting to his song Unpaid Intern. The end result of him writing about himself is fantastically earnest and thought-provoking despite the groundwork being very small.

It’s something you appreciate as a viewer when you’re watching it because it’s not like you are being let inside someone’s thoughts and feelings, you are being let inside someone’s thoughts and feelings. He has used the concept of being by oneself to think about oneself conceptually. That is perhaps what I admire most about INSIDE because it’s a special, secret slice of Bo Burnham. Personally, I’m self-conscious that I’m scrubbing myself and who I am over everything I do when it isn’t entirely necessary or that I’m tricking myself into thinking people are interested. No-one looks at INSIDE and thinks that Burnham is being narcisstic or self-absorbant.

Of course, it isn’t a new thing that an artist has put a piece of themself into something that they’ve made but it’s rare that someone has done it this way.

Conceptually, Burnham has created something unique that does defy the laws of what movies should be. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but if you’ve ever tried to recommend this to someone else, you struggle to describe what it even is because, unlike the fucking boring Death Stranding, it actually has invented a new genre. If there is one thing I hate in craft, it’s rules. Bo has given me something to aim for in that respect.

I don’t know if I speak for every single neurodivergent person out there but I don’t struggle with autism. I struggle with other people not having it or not even having a concept of what it is. I don’t expect total empathy but it would be nice if I got a centimeter of wiggle room when it came to social situations without coming across like I want cheat codes for life.

I use the pronoun “my” because everyone experiences autism differently and it’s such a complicated diagnosis that it’s entirely understandable why neurotypical people are very confused by it. It doesn’t help that autism isn’t really touched upon in education or that representation of neurodivergent people in the media is pretty poor. Often, whenever an uninitiated neurotypical person thinks of autism, they either think of edgy internet humour or Rain Man and they’re just as bad as each other in my estimation.

I was diagnosed in Primary School when I was about seven years old but at the time, I didn’t think much of it. I might’ve told some of my friends at school but I couldn’t tell them anything about what it meant or anything. I never understood why my parents took me to this place far out of town where this man in a suit was asking me bizarre questions and conundrums or why I had to leave the room for several minutes whilst the man just spoke to my parents.

I was one of those kids who was steadfastly attached to a counsellor because I had a short fuse in the nursery which carried on until I was about nine years of age. I don’t remember her ever having a conversation with me about my diagnosis. Maybe she wasn’t qualified to speak about it or something, I don’t know.

Anyway, I only really took notice of it when I was fourteen because I started to realize that I was missing pieces of puzzles all the time. Throughout school, I had a terrible fear of failure in the sense that I didn’t want to try and do anything without very specific instructions because I was scared of the consequence of doing it wrong. People would tell me jokes and I wouldn’t get them. I would miss social cues sometimes. I was overly self-conscious of things that “normal” people aren’t supposed to be self-conscious of like the size of my shoes.

Then, I was worried about telling anyone because of the stigma attached to it at the time. Being raised by the internet mostly, people made fun of autism all the time and not in a particularly fun way. Being autistic meant that you were stupid and sub-human. I feared facing direct harrassment in real life so I left it alone for a bit. Only my friends knew about it.

It wasn’t until I was about eighteen where I realized that it was something special about me; it was part of my character. I read more about it. I talked to people online who also had autism or they were concerned that they might have it and encouraged them to be diagnosed. I was exploring it and I realized that it was more interesting than I thought. I embraced it. One of the very few good things about the internet is that you are allowed to be who you are and find other people who are the same as you. I know this is because of social engineering and advertising etc but still.

To this day, I still live with it and it still does bother me from time to time but I feel like part of being human is self-exploration and learning to live with yourself. There are still times where I act irrationally because I’m socially paranoid which is an off-shoot of me being a constant thinker. There is still a fear of me doing or saying the wrong thing to upset people or that I’m misinterpreted. Not having many friends at school, I’m keen to get attached to people but I get quickly overwhelmed and anxious. I would still probably suffer a sensory overload in nightclubs which can lead to something like panic attacks All this is part of learning about yourself and it’s a disservice to not try and address it. Not to solve it, but to realize who you are and accept yourself.

What some neurodivergent people are self-conscious of is the idea of masking. This essentially means that you hide autistic behaviours by doing an impression of a neurotypical individual which is a practice that is definitely unhealthy. I’ve been guilty of this throughout university when I’m rubbing shoulders with people I barely know because there is an element of safety in it. Ultimately though, you should be allowed to be yourself in real life and I do know that there are some people who see my overanalysis in conversation and wished that I would shut the fuck up. What I say to that is that there will be people like that anyway if you’re autistic or not and we should work together to normalize being who you are. “Normal” to me is who I am.

Really, I’ve had it easy in comparison to other autistic folk. Some won’t find out for ages that they’re autistic because they don’t have anyone around them showing concern or, if you’re AFAB, you have to jump through all these hoops because of the inherently sexist industry. In 2021, the “woman are just hysterical” viewpoint is indeed, still a thing. I spare a thought for people who are getting diagnosed after their teens when I got diagnosed in about an hour. To those people, I encourage you to keep pressing forward with it and to not give up getting the help and support you need. It’ll be alright because it’s not as scary as Rain Man makes it out to be.

If there is anyone reading this who is concerned that they might be autistic or that they know someone who does. I say that you don’t need to be concerned. If you want to be diagnosed, push for the diagnosis but if you can’t or you don’t want to. That’s fine too. Do what I did. Reach out to other autistic people and talk to them. Join a Discord server and have a chat because there are more neurodivergent people out there than you might think and they are all looking to open the conversation as well.

C/W: R/W Conspiracy Theories

I recently left Twitter for what is probably the tenth time I would’ve said. I also would’ve said that my reasons for leaving each time were the near enough the same.

Simply being on it, through one way or another, drives me up the wall.

This time though, I feel like I’ve properly re-evaluated my relationship with Twitter and come to real conclusions about the reality of the kind of place that it is.

It’s been fairly recent that Twitter has properly blown up into the monster that it is and it coincides with Facebook becoming uncool which I would’ve said to be around 2015 or 2016 at a guesstimate. i’ve been in an on-again/off-again relationship with the blue bird since 2012 when I was thirteen which is not a great age to be on it now. It wasn’t really a problem back then though because no-one used it. If you look at tweets from 2012 from major brands, you’d struggle to find a post that reached 300 likes. Celebrities might not get to 300 retweets whereas now, the likes of BTS easily clock 100k RTs and gobble half a million likes for breakfast.

I’m not one for crowded places for a start. I’m susceptible to a sudden wave of extreme and overwhelming self-consciousness which is otherwise known as a panic attack and only a couple of things activate it. Heterosexual nightclubs or vulnerability in an online space although I’ve been far better in recent years. Essentially, I get too emotionally invested in something publically and I walk in on myself and see all these eyes staring at me so I clam up. That’s one thing about Twitter that frightens me.

Something that I used to thrive on but have since rejected was pointing at conspiracy subscribers and laughing but, living in this current world, it isn’t really something that you can laugh about anymore. It’s just a downer never mind it being a broken record. There’s only so much material you can wring out of them before you find yourself alone in your house being angry at an invisible person with a bunch of numbers in their handle and an egg for a face. Whilst scrolling through Twitter, anything could be delivered to you and often, you don’t have any control over it.

Sometimes, you do have complete control. I have no idea why I have an impulse to open a reply section when I know exactly what will be inside it and that’ll definitely set me off for the rest of the day. If you don’t use Twitter or that you don’t use it that often, you might say “Well, it’s easy to just block or mute words or phrases”

Here’s the funny thing.

Twitter will do it’s best to make sure you see it anyway. It not being the specific post or person but the same sort of thing whether you like it or not because Twitter is supposed to be for everybody. You can not escape.

For context, I muted over 200 words or phrases and blocked over 600 accounts. Twitter encourages you to have arguments with people or come out with controversial hot takes so you can rack up the twat points and that can’t be healthy can it?

I don’t like having arguments and I never have. They almost never go anywhere or lead to any conclusion and just leave me feeling cold. Whenever I get into any slight disagreement on Twitter, I just feel frustrated because it’s no place to be having a nuanced discussion about anything. You start treating debate like firing missiles in a battlefield because you have to pick what bases you want to cover, how you want to make sense of it all and how it is explained clearly for the recipient so you can achieve a victory. The moment you click send, you have to start preparing your rebuttal because the other person is already preparing their counter-strike.

Why? Who gives a fuck? Who are these people? Why do we insist on combative conversation?

It’s the same reason why I don’t bother responding to people on this website messaging me calling me a cunt because I didn’t like Life Is Strange. What’s the best that they are hoping for? It’s the same on Twitter, same anywhere.

The reason why I like Instagram and that I’ve never fallen out with it is that it doesn’t really suggest conversation of any kind. It’s not the primary focus of the app (outside of the gathering of data), the primary focus is for looking at whatever images you like. It definitely does have it’s harmful side if you follow a great gambit of influencers but, unlike Twitter, if you don’t follow them, you won’t know they exist. I just follow my friends to see the serene scenes of their jogs up to Loch Lomond or walking their dogs in the Argyll country. Folk are generally happier on Instagram and they aren’t likely to post paragraphs of their thoughts and opinions on the new Zack Snyder movie. It’s comforting to be on it.

Because Twitter can make you laugh now and again, you want to stick around for the craic so you forget about all the times you’ve seen the same joke repeated. This does have a bit to do with how I’ve became sick of Twitter as well. I find that good jokes on Twitter get ruined immediately with either folk stealing it, rehashing it or repackaging it because, as per discussed, everyone is looking for the high score that’ll get them a pocket pussy sponsorship or whatever. So no meme is safe from being butchered and bastardized by someone who has “Turn Notifications On” in their bio. Not to sound like your grandad but it does feel like you’re living in an echo chamber - an echo chamber of crap patter.

The best part is that you can’t “mute” an image so you can’t see that fucking annoying lord of the rings meme template often enough.

Long story short; that’s why I’ve stopped using Twitter.