Masters of Creative Writing - Update

Well, I am about three weeks into my MA program and so far so good. It's been pretty intense. It's not so much been to do with external pressure from supervisors and so forth, but more the kind of pressure that my fellow students and I are putting on ourselves in the creative sense.

The aim of the year is to write a book of a 'publishable standard', which you know, well, that's pretty alarming. At the moment I am sleeping very restlessly, the way you can do when you start a new job. I head into fitful rest with lines of poetry, my own and others, running through my head and I wake to the same kind of thing, thinking 'oh, maybe I can change that line like THIS'. If it happens at night I have to get up and write it down, or it'll be gone come dawn.

I'm realising more and more what a difficult thing it is to produce quality art. Art that seems good to you very rarely seems good to others, or at least not in the way that you would hope it to impact the person reading or viewing it. You can have a magnificent, life altering vision in your head of how you want it to look and sound on paper but the execution of that is so very very difficult!

And how to portray all the nuances of life?! How to show the complexity of the thing that you want to express without making it seem like a contrived load of shit? And how to CHOOSE what to write about? And then HOW to actually write about that thing? !!?!?!?sdksljeih olasindfl nln 03-48690wu@#%$@#%$ !!!

Over the last few days I have been cursing myself for not having a better vocabulary and an extra 20 points on my IQ and have come to understand that I am at the very bottom of a huge creative mountain and that only years and years of hard work are going to get me to a place in which I feel I am reaching my potential. And that's O.K.

There are two possibilities at the moment for what I'd like my thesis / book to be about. 1) some kind of question about death and memory written by turning my dead relatives into symbiotic robot / human people who come back from a special futuristic governmental unit and are changed in good and not so good ways. haha. I'm serious though. And 2) I more straightforward collection of my poetry about observations of life / beauty / sadness, you know the drill.

Anywhooo, we shall see.