7 Things I would really love to be able to write
- A memoir. I'm really hoping that it turns out I will have the sort of interesting and exciting and unique and splendid life that people write biographies about. Of course I will publish this memoir when I am very old so that all the people I defame are mostly dead. (I don't think I'd actually defame anyone. I think we should all just live forever, too.)
- Poetry. I am incredibly disappointed that I will never have awful emo poetry from my youth to someday look back on and cringe. (Instead, I have a book in print! Even better.) But I really enjoy reading poetry (I wish I read more. Recommend me some poets/publications, yo!), and a really wonderful poem can capture in a couple of lines an incredible amount of emotion and meaning. I'd like to be that succinct and powerful. Or at least have a go, and have some awful stuff to dig up later on.
- A full journal. Writers are supposed to keep diaries, aren't they? I've always been bad at this. I have the best intentions - I bought a nice green journal at Officeworks at the start of this year, it cost me fifteen dollars (seriously) because I was so committed to being a journaller, and practicing my craft, and having something to look back on. I've written three pages and they were just lists of books I want to write. I just find writing about my life incredibly awkward and self-indulgent because not much really happens to me. I do a lot of thinking, but I tend to work through it in fiction. I know, I am a sad imposter for a legit writer.
- Lyrics. As a child, I had dreams of becoming a rockstar. (I also had dreams of becoming a psychologist, a writer, a teacher, a marine biologist and fifty other things. I continue to have a lot of impractical dreams, which are clearly the best kind.) I would really very much like to write concise and profound lyrics. I'd also like to be able to sing really well and play seven different instruments and have really effortless messy rockstar hair. I'm not really keen on doing the hard yards to achieve these things (especially the hairstyling bit), though, since I am not the most musically gifted, and generally leave it up to other people who have talent in this field.
- A really long and complex novel. I have no idea how people manage to write those hundred-and-fifty-thousand-word behemoths with about a thousand characters and two different realities and a saga that plays out across ten generations. You know, the kind that you finish reading after a month, and you can't tell which world is the real one and which is a work of fiction? I want to write one of those. That would be great. I tend to run out of steam at the fifty thousand word mark and get confused if I have more than ten characters in a book. (I can never keep track of what people look like. I am devising a filing system for the next book.)
- A lot of witty things on the internet. I think a lot of people conflate who they are on the internet with who they are in real life. Sometimes I suffer from this. Especially considering a lot of people will never know me in real life, but can read my words on the interwebs. So I want to be really smart and great all the time, and then the pressure from myself to be smart and great gets to me, and I end up writing stuff that is not smart and great, for instance this sentence. Also if I was always incredibly intelligent on the internet, that would be even less representative of my real-world self, who is more of a listener than a talker and can't really edit as she speaks. Which is a pity. But I ramble.
- Letters. Everyone always says, let's bring back letter-writing! How quaint and kitsch we will be! No one means it! I so want to write letters again, as lovely as lengthy and instantaneous and easy-to-write emails are. (I would also love to have more phone conversations with people. Texting is not the same.) I never really wrote many letters in the first place. If only I had people to write letters to! And it didn't require all the effort of finding some paper and a decent pen and writing neatly and getting an envelope and then a stamp and that costs sixty cents and I don't have any change and then finding a mailbox and feeling worried because what if it gets lost in the mail... I think I know why this isn't in vogue anymore. I am so committed to writing letters, though. Just like I'm committed to journalling.
