September 23, 2008
Having hardly left the house over the last two days – owing to a flu-like virus which has me coughing up things I never expected a human lung to contain – I'm slightly at a loss as to what to write about. You see, I was never any good at sitting behind a desk and picking my brain for inspiration, coming up with paradigm-bending theorems on micro credit or drinking a pint of vodka on the way to a new idea for a TV series. Not that I haven't tried.
First, there were the “writers’ soirees” with my freshman-year girlfriend. She’d crank out ten pages of quality prose in three hours, take a break, smoke through a pack of Chesterfields, drink a bottle of wine, go back to writing, and crank out ten more. I’d watch her type, read ten pages of a magazine, smoke two or three Chesterfields, drink one glass of wine, get dizzy, and fall asleep.
Second, there was the inevitable summer backpacking trip through Europe. Nineteen years old, lured by the thought of sitting at a café armed with an expensive pen, a black notepad and a fashionably anorexic French waif looking adoringly over my shoulder, I tried my hand at novel writing. What I came up with, plot-wise, was this: A twenty-year old up-and-comer ditches school, friends, and the promise of a six-figure salary to pursue a writing career; fails (miserably); writes a long and self-pitying letter about the torments of a creative soul unable to create; and shoots himself.
Really. That, at age nineteen, was my idea of a book. (Well, it probably still is. Which is why I haven’t tried writing fiction since).
Thirty-odd pages into this disgrace – thanks largely to a thirty-year old Dutch woman who made me realize that there were better things to do on summer break in Europe than to write dull and pretentious prose – I stopped. Later in life, with no Dutch women around, I tried to fuel my writing with alcohol. For a while, it actually worked, and I'd manage to draft a decent poem or two each night before passing out cold. After a few months, however, the inevitable liver problems aside, I began to lose focus. I stopped thinking, “I need a shot to get me going” and began thinking, “I need a shot”. Not that I was becoming an alcoholic. I was becoming the sort of guy who'd pop open his laptop, pour himself a drink and – two hours and five drinks later – find himself staring not at a laboriously contrived poem, but at something along the lines of “Top NBA dunks of 2005” or a documentary on animal husbandry.
All this is to say that I've always found it exceedingly difficult to write “creatively”, that is, from scratch. To write at all, I needed something to react to. A person, say, or a scene. It’s probably what fuels my need to travel. If I can’t come up with a good story on my own, I need to witness one, and describe it.
Which is why, two days into my stay in Istanbul, sick as a dog, I have little or nothing to write about. I do, however, have plenty of stupid internet videos to watch.
Video 1: Donkey Sex
Video 2: Unmanned Spokesdrone Completes First Press Conference
