Meta
My hands are imperfect implements, marring the perfection that exists within the shell of self. Each anticlimactic act of creation shadowing my soul; a shackling cloud unsympathetically affronting the sun.
Indulgent writing about the inherent difficulties of writing: I'm so meta -_- The Man Booker Prize here I come! I'm reminded of the advice given by a high school english teacher not to begin a assessed creative piece with "I am sitting in the exam room deciding what to write about," as such a premise is not as unique as many people think.
In a documentary, John Banville described his process of working as follows.
When I'm working all I see is a blank wall. Sometimes you stop in the middle of a working day and say "what on earth am I doing? I'm supposed to be an adult person, why am I sitting here writing these burnished lies? For who am i doing it? Why does it seem so important to me? Why is it consuming my life?" It's interesting because when I stop writing for the day and I have my first glass of wine and I begin to turn into something resembling a human being again I can't remember... Say I've written four or five sentences in the afternoon, which would be a good afternoon for me. I can't remember those sentences, I can remember the gist of them, because somebody else wrote them. The person sitting with the dinner table pretending the be human with a glass of wine in his hand is not the person sitting at the desk writing.
I appreciate his candour surrounding the writing process and in particular the pace of which he considers acceptable work. Writing is not a linear process and speaking of progression with such a simplistic metric is a primitive characterisation that one must be careful not to misconstrue but it is one that I'm willing to accept. The disembodiment of the creative endeavour is also reminiscent of the Greek mythological concept of a muse inspiring the arts.
