Like a wrecking ball

I hang, suspended from a yellow crane, waiting for the eventual destruction.

For me, writing is all about buying time from my brain. Someone said something at uni today about their brain often working too fast to type down the flow of ideas. The formation of language on the page often becoming a fragment of the brilliance once envisioned, momentarily, then, gone as though it were simply never there at all.

It's like I've got a wrecking ball in my skull waiting for the words to form there, allowing the ideas to ferment (okay, maybe I've actually got a brewery in my head) before I knock them onto the page.

I've only written the one page of my stageplay, and while I plan on writing more tonight, to have a somewhat decent working draft to bring to class tomorrow, I've got a decent idea of how the story's mutated since I last wrote that page. So now I'm wondering, is this the same building that I knocked down the other day? It certainly looks different. Truth is, I don't really know.

Sometimes those spontaneous clusterfucks of words spilling onto the page without premeditative thoughts can be a godsend. Sometimes they can be fantastic filler while you think of the real juicy, real punchy words you want to throw on the page.

I'm writing an experimental short story for dotdotdash. It's linear (hmm... should I fuck with continuity too?), but the plot is something I find difficulty in putting into words. Something about a blues club and a haunted jukebox and nightmares folding in upon themselves. I've got stories within stories within stories, which sit alongside story fragments tossed about for good measure.

It's one of a very few stories that I've written that actually takes place in a real location in the real world. Sure, I made up the blues club, it doesn't really exist somewhere along Esperance's coastline, somewhere way down an old dirt track. But it does take place in a fictionalised Esperance, which you can find on a map, and the road along the cliffs and coast, that's there too. I can't recall exactly what the beaches over that side of town are like, but there are some beaches like the one I describe in the story. And, through some divine inspiration I've found myself taking the story in the most unlikeliest of places, Turkmenistan. And I'm currently about the point where I want to insert an author's note to suck the reader right out of the story to make them think about what they're reading. Like a wrecking ball, come back to reality, the fourth wall comes tumbling down.

I'm thinking of maybe making a zine out of it for my experimental writing assessment. Maybe formatting it to really flip things around. Maybe messing with typography and aesthetic apearance, or something along those lines. I guess it's sort of a natural progression from the stuff I've been writing lately. I'm usually pretty focussed on my narrator's subjective stance, playing around with language there. Now it's more layering in different voices, playing with tenses and perspectives, juxtaposing the surreal with the real, dreams commenting on reality, imagined characters commenting on real characters, authorial intrusion commenting on the narrative, blurring the lines of the story and splicing them into a multiplicity of meanings.

And the wrecking ball, swinging back and forth in my head, smashing my brains onto the floor, fragments upon fragments upon fragments that I cannot possibly pick up.