(no subject)

I've written almost 8 pages today, bringing me to about halfway through the novel. I've never felt so psyched about it. There was always an air of half-desperation around it before -- it's something I have to do. Now I can actually see it amounting to something.

All I did was quell a little voice inside me that self-censored. Some of the stuff I censored was because it was too controversial, and some of it because it wasn't sufficiently literary. I was cutting out the hard parts and replacing them with television.

But my English Lit studies did exactly what I hoped they would -- they taught me how to write. Except they taught me that the standards I was living up to were meaningless, and I already knew how to write in a way that wasn't contrived, and that was honest.

There were parts of the novel that needed to be written -- not that I needed to write them, but they needed to be written -- and whenever I finished it, it was like a body missing an organ: it couldn't come to life. It was missing parts that were already supplied to me, and which I couldn't put on paper -- too prudish, too squeamish.

( more literary stuff )