2019 – The Year, the Decade, and the Future

Every year – bar last – I do a little retrospective write-up on how the year’s gone, and my plans for the future. The reason I didn’t do one for 2018 was because it was, quite frankly, awful. Didn’t feel like recapping that one. But I mention it here because it informed a lot of my 2019; I spent most of this year with the mindset that I was laying low, emotionally speaking, not trying to make too many leaps and bounds as far as life goes. I just wanted to… breathe. To recuperate. But as a result. this year has been hugely uneventful. The largest change was probably when I left one of my two retail jobs, in favour of taking overtime to make up hours at Job Number Two. How eventful.

The thing is, when living a quiet and dull life like I’ve been doing, happiness lies in simpler things. Hanging out with friends, in reality or online. Getting immersed in a really good RPG. Falling in love with an animated series from 2004. To a certain subset of people this might sound boring or dreadful. but I’ve never been one for loud environments or friend groups with shifting relationships and regular arguments. Outside of actual meetups with friends, I’m happiest behind my PC, talking over Discord, maybe playing a few rounds of a multiplayer game together. And I did a decent amount of that in 2019.

But if you’re reading all of that and thinking, wouldn’t you be in a rut after a year of this? My answer to you is, oh, absolutely, little bit bored to death to be honest. So next year I want to break free of the mould a bit. Give myself license to continue developing as a person, if that makes sense. For a year I decided that attempts to do so were too painful, but if the last month has taught me anything it’s that life can bite you at any time, in any number of ways, and it won’t let up just because you’ve had enough. It doesn’t care that you’re trying to hibernate from life. Life keeps ticking by all the same, and you’ll always be a part of it. You’ve just kinda gotta… deal with it as it comes.

(that being said I still have huge motivation issues so don’t expect me to up and change as a human being in the next five minutes)

But it hasn’t just been a year, has it? It’s been a decade. Blimey. And don’t argue that the decade starts with 2021, because Gregor the Calendar Man disagrees with you and that’s the one you plan all your birthdays with. Besides, it’s just nicer, isn’t it? 2020. Nice even start. The only issue I can see with next year is all the hurr hurr 2020 vision jokes. Make them stop…

So, 2010. At the start of this decade I was checks 14 years old! You do a lot of growing and changing between the ages of 14 and 24, and from where I’m standing it seems that I’ve changed from a loud and brash teenager with far too much energy and an attention seeking complex, to a… well, that’s the thing. The energetic and abrasive me still comes out when I’m amongst friends, I think, but for the most part I’m fairly quiet and reserved nowadays. I have colleagues I haven’t spoken to in three years, for fuck’s sake.

Anyways, start-of-the-decade-Kristian was often abrasive but also prone to bouts of melancholy, which I’d often beat myself up about, having convinced myself I was being overly dramatic. I was preparing for GCSEs, and had vague plans of taking the educational route through A-Levels and then University and then somehow becoming an author. Two out of three’s not bad, eh? I got middling GCSE grades (mostly Cs and two Bs) and took three subjects as A-Levels – English Lit, ICT and History. For History I had to bus to another school which had enough students giving a crap about the subject to actually warrant teaching it, and there I met a new group of friends who I spent a great two years with. I also had a tough second half of 2012, starting with the death of Nathan Wills, an internet personality who I’d sometimes spoken to, which I took quite hard. Events cascaded from there, with each of my closest friends going through various hardships, until the stress of me worrying about them led to me breaking down and crying in front of my parents, which was personally an extreme threshold of emotional stress to have crossed.

Times continued to move, though, and as friends we supported each other and moved forwards. I finished my A-Levels with decent grades, and scraped together enough UCAS points to be accepted into the Creative Writing course I’d applied for at the university of my choice. I spent three years there and made some more amazing friends. Some of the best days of my life will be counted amongst the various writer’s retreats we embarked on in Boscastle over the years. I have never felt so driven as an individual, or felt like I had as much of a purpose as when I was studying there. I learned a lot about writing, about the world and myself. But it was also a course that left me with a lot of free time, and this was the era of my life when I really dived deep into online games like World of Warcraft, and made some of my best online memories, too. But despite Blizzard’s best attempts to distract me, I still graduated from uni with upper second class honors (basically a B, which is good) in Creative Writing. Woohoo! Where do we go from here?

Well…

Stagnation?

Viewing my life from a purely critical or objective standpoint at this time, it becomes slightly embarrassing. I promptly did nothing with my writing degree and picked up not just one, but two retail jobs. I’ve met some great people and don’t necessarily regret my time working there, but they absolutely should not have become my final destinations as they have been so far, and the fact that I’m living such a safe and low-key life while working retail is probably the reason behind my underlying discontent. I also suspect some from mental health is at play to some degree, but I won’t self-diagnose on something that important.

I could sit here and speculate on reasons behind my lack of motivation or success in finding writing-relevant jobs in my area, but I’d only make myself miserable and possibly others frustrated. All I’ll say for now is that in the next decade, I hope to find myself back on a meaningful path in life. And in my defence, as I stated earlier, I’ve found happiness in the more day-to-day aspects of my life, like gaming with friends and creating content as a hobby. And as I’ve been saying for years, the very point of life is to be happy within it. And I am. To an extent.

Next decade will be about pushing that extent to a place that I’m less… ashamed of.

Happy New Year, everybody.

Self-Reflection

For as long as I can remember, I’ve believed that the key to becoming a better person lies in one’s ability to see the world and themselves from many different perspectives. This way, they can avoid ignorance, unnecessary offense, and generally be kinder to others.

Sometimes, we don’t follow our own rules. I had to remind myself this morning that no matter your philosophies or beliefs, self-reflection and re-adjustment are always necessary, or you’ll find yourself slipping into another person who you might not entirely like. On Twitter this morning, I came close to creating a game, which, should it have taken off (which I’m sure it wouldn’t have), could have potentially offended many authors.

The premise of the game was to tweet the hashtag, conjure up the name of a pretentious-sounding novel, and then search for it in Google. If it was a real novel, you gained a point. If it was also a movie, you gained two. I rather quickly deleted these tweets after realising that creating a game that is literally about judging a book based on its cover is one of the dumbest and most ignorant things I could do.

The concept of being pretentious is, from my understanding, the act of claiming to have a high standard of morals and acting like you support charities and movements, but only so that you can gain some sort of moral upper-hand over your friends and be revered and admired by the people around you; so that they can call themselves a better person than you.

Basing an author’s ideals on the name of their book, therefore, is a rather dense thing to do. It could be a lovely book; it could be good, and simply not my cup of tea. It could even be autobiographical and highly self-critical. And that is why continual self-reflection is important, else I would not have realised this.

Sorry this blog post has been rather self-centric today. Coming up I hope to be making some blog posts about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and writing comedically, and the rise of storytelling in videogames such as those found in Telltale Games’ creations. Also, maybe a thing or two about cats, and why they shall become transcendent beings.

In Defence of Clichés

Anyone who’s been taught anything about writing is told to avoid clichés at all costs. They’re treated like some monstrous disease that will infect your entire work and render it useless if used at all, in any quantity. Personally, I think that’s unfair.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for originality. The biggest fear I have with my writing – besides not succeeding – is ending up writing about another single mother who has a secret tragic past that comes back to haunt her in an explosive turn of events. Or writing about the young man whose father escapes from prison and wants him dead. You know, the typical thriller. Dean Koontz is one of my favourite authors and he has some really great original ideas but some of his books can be a bit like that.

But I digress. I was talking about clichés having a bad reputation. It’s not that I would like to write a story with a million cliché lines in it, it’s just that I’m wary of the formation of a cliché itself. Thinking about this logically, it would seem that every cliché once started off as an original idea or saying. It would be safe to presume that between it being original to it becoming cliché, it would have become popular; so much so that it got worn out. For the idea to become popular it had to be revolutionary, or effective. If this is the case, then perhaps clichés are just ideas or concepts that have gone out of date. Take the shower scene in Pyscho, for instance. What once terrified audiences has now become a roll-your-eyes type scenario.

This worries me. It feels like writers now have too many potholes they have to avoid in order to spare themselves from being cliché. Just how many different ways of phrasing things are there left that won’t flag up this crucial criticism? I mentioned about the almost stereotypical thriller story earlier; how long until tragic pasts become cliché? Are they cliché already? Must writers really avoid telling certain stories simply because they’re too similar to older ones?

Typically, constructive criticism doesn’t frustrate me. It’s useful and helpful, and nowadays is given to me by people far more experienced than myself. But I do feel a slight pang of annoyance when someone points out that one of my characters is being cliché. I wrote that character acting that particular way because it benefits the story, but because that particular aspect has been done before, I have to work around it.

This isn’t supposed to be a whinge. It’s just interesting to me that the concept of the cliché exists, and how it can undermine writers at times. I suppose my concern about this is a variant of the classic fear that writers are going to run out of original stories to tell. Look at soap operas and cheap dramas, and pay attention to how often they repeat storylines with different characters. I’m willing to sacrifice the knowledge that I enjoy Waterloo Road a little too much, if it means I can use it as an example. While I love the show, I have to admit that they repeat the same stories every few seasons, just with different characters. A few examples are the students with terminal illnesses, the personal life of the head-teachers going haywire, and the constant teacher-student misunderstandings that could cost somebody their job (but somehow never does).

I’m not sure this blog post really has a point. Maybe it is a whinge and I’m too proud to realise it. One could say that it makes sense for certain ideas, phrasings and genres to become stale and overdone. I’m sure I’ll disagree vehemently with my stubborn defence of clichés, a few years down the line. Stay tuned for my self-contradiction!