Kristian’s Brain (Or: How My Low Self-Esteem Got Me A 2:1)

Having low self-esteem is one of the defining qualities of being a Kristian Richmond. Whether it’s poking my chubby tub, frowning at myself in the mirror or driving myself into a state over other people’s opinions, I’m always finding ways to make myself feel down about something. And I’m far from the only person in the world – in even a 2 mile radius – to be so crushingly hard on myself. But instead of this being a blog post where I analyse my reasons for having low self-esteem, and bore you all to tears whilst doing so, I’m actually here to discuss a rather amusing prospect.

It may have just saved my degree.

In the first semester of the year I had two modules to complete instead of the typical three, as the third was essentially my dissertation which carried over into the next semester. So, these two semester A modules – Advanced Prose Fiction and Poetry Writing – they didn’t go quite as planned. I’ll be honest, I thought I crushed Poetry Writing. The creative assessment (which is what yours truly chose) consisted of writing 6 poems and then writing about them, and all through the semester I received rather positive feedback on all of them! I even wrote a poem from the perspective of Henry VIII (I was watching The Tudors at the time), utilizing Martianism to explore how he’d feel about modern-day England. But both that module and Advanced Prose Fiction came back as a 56, or a 2:2 (or a C). Far from the worst mark in the world, but I vaguely remember just scraping a 2:1 on average for the previous year, and needing this year to count. This, coupled with crippling demotivation and disinterest towards my dissertation, led me to ending semester A feeling very insecure about my future grades.

As of last week I’ve gotten all of my grades back for semester B. They were all 2:1s. Healthy 2:1s at that. Almost firsts! And that really surprised me, given that earlier in the semester I’d put up a totally-non-public-meltdown status telling people not to be surprised if I got a 2:2 and that it wasn’t for lack of trying, that they’d all overestimated me, yadda yadda. (I got a whole bunch of support <3).When I handed my coursework in I was absolutely sure that it was 2:2 material, and spent the next week or so in a bit of a sulk.

(Alright, quick pause. I want to clarify that a 2:2 is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Nor is a third. These are still difficult qualifications that you have achieved from a uni course. My panic about getting a 2:2 was mostly due to some perceived expectations and personal fears of underachievement. And if you didn’t get a grade, if you dropped out or didn’t get into uni at all? There are still a bunch of other things you can do better than someone with a specific degree. The academic system does not define your worth as a human being, so don’t let it put you down.)

Here’s what happened. Due to my lack of self-belief and low self-esteem, I eyed my work with more scrutiny than I otherwise would have. In my mind, it wasn’t even to do with putting more effort in, but rather, a last ditch attempt to throw together more academic sources than I otherwise would in order to almost trick my way into a higher grade. That’s right, even when I forced myself to write at a slightly higher level, I put myself down for it. But hey, it worked. I’ve got a 2:1 on average for this year, and if I recall my previous results correctly, this should all add up to a 2:1 in my BA Creative Writing degree (I hope). Hurrah!

This isn’t just some kind of warped brag, though. What I’m getting at here is that the self-abusing human mind is not to be trusted. Time and time again I am reminded of the frightening power of perspective, and its ability to warp reality. It can turn innocent glances into rude stares, harmless humour into snide remarks, honest work into half-baked attempts at looking busy, and friendships into superficial relationships. Every day we have to fight to maintain our rationalism and to keep the world as objectively true as we can, and it’s one of the driving forces behind my constant pursual for a state of objectivity.

(Final side-note: I haven’t really looked in to that much about objectivity or objectivism, so I have no idea if it keeps in line with my way of looking at the world the entire time or descends into some sort of utilitarian Nazi party. If the latter, let it be known – I do not attend these parties!)

 

Victory Yoghurt

The dissertation. It’s done. It’s in. For better or for worse, it is over.

So how was it?

Well now, that’s a very broad question. Firstly, I should address what my dissertation even was. I’m a Creative Writing student, so my dissertation was essentially to take everything that I’d learned and write an 8,000 word piece of fiction to hand in, alongside a 2,000 word critical commentary. At the beginning of the course, this sounded very appetizing. “We can write whatever we want!” I probably exclaimed. “Piece of cake!”

And unless I was talking about a cake made out of obsidian, then I was wrong.Whilst the prospect of writing 8,000 fictional words may sound promising when you have dozens of half-baked ideas swirling around your head, the time of actually choosing what story to write for your magnum opus becomes a little trickier. Suddenly all of those ideas are awful or previously used, and you’re left stranded in the dark with nothing but a vague “Write a good story!” to go off of.

I ended up writing a thriller piece named Rerouted, which I shan’t discuss too much here. Let’s just say that the narrative was experimental and focused on perspective, which is a key interest of mine. As a story in itself, I think it turned out alright. I’d happily return to it and tweak it a bit and include it in a collection of short stories someday. But a magnum opus it was not. In my opinion, it failed to delve as deeply into the fascinating possibility of perspective as it could, and the entire time I was writing the thing I had doubts about the actual message that the narrative would deliver by the end. It was not the intended conglomeration of writing skills and abilities I’d picked up over the previous semesters. It is merely, at best, a decent story with an interesting narrative perspective.

The critical commentary was worse though. For those of you who don’t know, a critical commentary is a creative writer’s chance to write academically about their own work, to prove that it reflects what they’ve learned in the module and that their fictional imaginings have merit as coursework by showing how it’s been influenced by the works they’ve studied. Of course, with the dissertation there were no set texts, merely a vague pointing towards the potential topics from previous modules. With this in mind, I focused on a text we’d studied last semester which had inspired my narrative style, and essentially tunnel-visioned it. By the end of my critical commentary I’d put almost no critical theory into the thing and had left little room in my argument for it, and by this point the deadline was fast approaching.

As a famous, lovable yellow bear once said, “Oh bother.”

So all of this has led to me frantically polishing and re-writing sections of my critical commentary, before handing in what will inevitably fall short of the grade I’ll desperately need if I’m to achieve a 2:1 in my university course overall. This did, you might imagine, leave me in a bit of an emotional slump, until I made a totally lighthearted Facebook post essentially daring anyone to be disappointed in me and was instead met with widespread support. Not only that, but we were gifted with frozen yoghurt upon handing in our dissertations. Frozen yoghurt! Who can stay upset when your university gives you frozen yoghurt? I might be dwelling a little too long on the frozen yoghurt. Let’s move on.

So why bother to make a public blog post to tell everyone about my marvelous underachievement? Well, personally, I believe that an honest assessment of one’s shortcomings is a healthy way to deal with such shortcomings. But if you want complete honesty, well, this dissertation has been practically my life for the past few weeks and so I have essentially nothing else to write about. In fact, I have more deadlines coming up! So that’s fine. I’d better run and start making with the fiction.

I wonder if they’ll have more frozen yoghurt on results day.

Actually, I’d better not think about results day.

A New Approach to Writing

I wrote 308 words today.

308 words. It’s not a lot, is it? And yet, it is. It really, really is. It’s the first 308 words of fiction I’ve written for months. The deadline is in a week and a half. And here’s the kicker: I can’t write stories which I started months ago. By then, I’ve played it all out in my head, I’ve told people about it, it’s done and I’m bored and I want to chase another dog’s tail.

Up until today, I’ve had an obsessive approach when it comes to writing. I’ve had to be in the perfect mood at the perfect time with no interruptions, and then I can just blitz over a thousand words at once. And typically, when I’ve written it all down, I’ll feel great for about… half an hour? And then the doubt sets in, deep and unrelenting. I read it back and, you know, it really isn’t that great, it has a lot of flaws and it needs a full rewrite. But by then I’ve already told the story, I’m bored of it. And so I let it rot in my stories folder until I come across it two years later and go, “Hey, that wasn’t actually so bad. What a waste.”

Blog posts are different, of course, because they’re non-fictional. You don’t need to think up plot, or characters, or a narrative. It’s not nearly as challenging, right? Except I used to approach blog posts the same way too, remember? One blog post every month and a half, not much in the way of editing, no working to deadlines; all natural.

And then I made myself write two blog posts a week.

A blog post will typically hit around 500 to 750 words, sometimes more, and sure, sometimes I don’t feel like writing them. But I’ve given myself a deadline, and I’ve committed to it on a public platform that I use as an example of my capabilities of a writer, so it’s a real deadline. And so far I’ve not missed a day in four months, besides the time WordPress failed to publish a scheduled post, and that came the day after. So why should writing fiction be any different?

I have been attending a university course about writing professionally (although many would argue that’s not possible), but I’ve still been approaching it as a hobby. Something that I only do when I really, really feel like doing it. And that not only leaves long stretches between the times that I write, it also doesn’t give me any time to get used to a particular style of writing or to really pledge myself to a piece of fiction. This latter point is something I have real trouble with, but as I’ve gone over in my gaming blog of all places, I’ve found that I’m slowly regaining the ability to focus on one thing and shut out all the others. It’s a little difficult, but it’s so much better.

I’m able to write hundreds upon hundreds of words and create worlds, and bring people into them. It’s a gift. It’s the one thing I’m remotely any good at, and lately it’s been like… a small aspect of my personality. I’ve been afraid to discipline myself into pushing that ability, in case I… what? Stop enjoying it? In case it becomes work? Well, aren’t you supposed to do what you love for your work? I admitted earlier that sometimes I don’t feel like writing these blog posts. And yet, when we truly get down to it, I’m not going anywhere. I love doing this, and I savor every reader. I may not exactly have a huge following, but this place truly does give me a sense of purpose, and it’s fun to tweak my brain for arrangements of words and topics.

Education has allowed me to break down other works of fiction, pick up on intertextuality, on subtle foreshadowing, extended metaphors, and it has enriched my experience of the world. There are times when this feels more like a burden that a blessing, but really, when it comes down to it, this deep-seated feeling of stagnancy and lack of purpose is probably born of my failure to sit and grab these threads of inspiration and write them down, even if it feels like work. I’ve been waiting for some shot of inspiration to come to me before I start writing, but I feel like sometimes it’s the other way around; you need to try before the inspiration comes. Write shit. Publish it proudly, then hide it away a year later. But do it often, and be relentless. Everything I’ve been avoiding.

There’s probably deeper reasons to me avoiding writing, stuff which doesn’t have anything to do with writing itself… but stuff ’em. To quote the logo of a certain company, just do it. Not that easy, sure, but if I sit here and wait for something to come to me then I’ll be the living incarnation of a monkey at a typewriter, and I’ll die of old age before Shakespeare comes to me. No. It’s time for a different approach.

I’ve written 308 words of fiction today. But this blog post is 914 words long, and New Year’s Resolve was written just an hour or so ago. So to hell with demotivation. You don’t need to feel motivated to continue trying, and if you don’t continue trying then you’ll fall into demotivation faster than gravity can pull your ass to earth.

The Joys of Writing for Screen

It isn’t very often that writers get to play with writing in formats they’re not familiar with. As a young writer who has only just started his Creative Writing course, I have the privilege of discovering what it means to write in these new formats. I’m sure when I’m older I’ll miss this sensation.

Having to adapt is not a bad thing. There have been times when I’ve been writing a short story and have wished that I could just skip the descriptive writing and focus entirely on the dialogue; there have been times when I’ve felt the opposite. This isn’t a major problem as I’ll typically just write a dialogue heavy or overly descriptive story, but now I’ll stop to wonder if I shouldn’t simply write a screenplay instead.

I had to write a script for either stage or screen for my latest piece of coursework. Having only written a stage play once and never having seen a screenplay in my life, this prospect was both alarming and exciting. To begin with I decided to write a stage play, as I already have a small bit of experience in it. After writing two pages, however, I quickly discovered that this particular plot – a quick encounter between a beggar and two politicians rather conspicuously named David and George – had no substance. It was only after I’d written two pages of the play that my brain informed me that there was nowhere to go from here. Being eight pages away from a finished piece of coursework, I turned to screen.

The first thing I did was download Celtx. That program is simply benign. As I mentioned earlier, I’d never even read a screenplay, let alone written one, so I had no idea how to lay one out on paper. After grappling with the UI for about half an hour, I’d gotten the hang of Celtx, and from then on the pages went by a little too fast. When I printed it off, it actually looked like a real screenplay. It was fantastic. Hopefully the content was up to par too.

Perhaps this is just my experience, but writing a screenplay allowed me to focus more on characterisation than in a standard piece of prose. I felt like the text automatically focused on the characters and their nuances within conversation more than any short story ever could. It was an interesting experience to play with stage directions and pay close attention to how a character should say something and what their body language would be like when saying it. I focused on an argument between two characters who had met for the first time in four years, so naturally I had a playground of emotions to explore. We had to include a monologue too, which I naturally turned into a hate-fuelled rant. I loved it. It was liberating, in a way. I do worry that I was a little bit of a control freak with all the stage direction, though.

Maybe it’s just been a little too long since I wrote any good characters in a short story.

Anyway, that’s my take on writing in a different format for the first time. I can’t remember my first time writing short stories as I was too young; I believe I started at the age of six. (I would love to go back and read my first few, but sadly, those are forever lost. What does a six year old even write about? I vaguely remember floating islands.) I was barely a teenager when I began my first attempts at poetry, which I blundered my way through for years until I found a foothold in the climb to not being awful. I suppose this is the first real writing format that I’d been taught about before I even began to attempt it. Maybe that’s what started this entire experience.

The next time I write a new format will probably be the first time I truly throw everything I have into writing a novel. I’ve written chaptered stories before, but I hesitate to call them novels. Minimal effort went into them with no thinking ahead. Let’s call them something different. I’m going to go with… abominations.