Cognitive Contradictions

This week two things have been true: I’m meeting my daily word goals and I’m incredibly distracted. My brain has scattered to many places this week and has been full of contradictions. 

For instance, one of my on-going endeavors is my “Classics Project,” an activity that I’ve been chipping away at since 2019. I’ve had this whole list of “classic” books I’m working my way through and writing reviews for. Depending on the book I’m tackling for it, it’s a fair amount of fun. Right now? Not so much.

I’m keeping a lot of company with War and Peace (Tolstoy), and I mean a lot. In case you didn’t know, that story is something like 1,400 pages long. Also, keeping company makes it sound like I’m actively making my way through its pages, but really I mean that it’s just a book that I’m shuffling around from one room to the next with me in the hope that, if I keep it near, I’ll start to want to read more of it. I started it literally the first day of March, and I’m making painstakingly slow progress. 

So, this week I was like, “I want to get some momentum going again for this project,” only to then also be like, “But I cannot drum up the motivation to pick up that chunky guy that’s been following me around for nearly two months.” 

See? Contradictory.

The biggest one is that I sit down to write more of the fifth pirate tale I’ve got going (which I’m having fun with, by the way), and then my brain says, “How about, instead, I offer you this idea: We re-read some of your favorite chapters from your Stranger Things fanfiction?” 

One half of me wants to buckle down to be productive; the other half wants to get a little lost frollicking in a fictional universe that isn’t even mine. Nor, even, is it cheery enough for the activity of frollicking, but here we are.

Contradiction.

On a side note, I’m so impatient to learn when the final season of Stranger Things is coming out. I’m not a TV person. I’m not a horror/thriller person. Yet, something about this show has me hooked. 

I didn’t watch it until August of 2022, quite a bit after it first aired. Season 4 had just dropped, I had COVID, and the only thing I had energy for, apparently, was binge-watching every episode. It was an odd month of my life because I wasn’t feeling so good (obviously), and I was hardly reading. Looking back at my book-tracking spreadsheet from this month, I see I only read two books. Two books. For context, my average for a month even then was about 10 books. 

So, there I was. An absolute trash can recovering and quarantining and not partaking of my favorite pastime. But the number of hours of Netflix I watched? In the span of a week? Couldn’t be me, yet somehow it was.

And, upon finishing all the available seasons of that show, a story idea gnawed at my brain. What else was I supposed to do but dump the scenes and words out of my head onto a blank page? It only escalated from there and turned into a multi-installment fanfic. Please, don’t judge me.

Often, I think about how much time I’ve put into this story that may seem silly because it’s not my original universe nor all my own characters nor plot elements. Any time I wonder if I’ve just been foolishly wasting time, however, I find that it doesn’t feel like I have. Because, though writing a fanfiction hasn’t been progressing my personal, original ideas, it’s kept me writing in seasons when I had no motivation for my own stuff. It felt like lower-stakes writing because it’s all truly been fun. There’s been no pressure of someday seeking publication with it or giving it to someone who’s going to give critical feedback, you know? There’s a certain ease to it.

It’s also helped me get better at writing scenes chronologically. I don’t know about you, but I’m someone who just writes whatever’s in my head on any given day. I’ll make notations in my Word Doc to indicate where, in the grand scheme of events, this latest bit fits into my story. I’ll go back to figure out how to connect scenes that I’ve written independent of each other. But, in the past, I rarely wrote plot events in the order they appear in the first finished draft. 

Writing a fanfiction that I was simultaneously posting online meant I couldn’t take my normal route. It just wouldn’t work. And that was a real challenge for me. 

Writing that way with my Stranger Things piece, though, helped me to see 1.) how I could do it and 2.) that I could do it at all. The pirate tales that I’m currently working on are being written that way—I’m developing them in chronological order and not jumping ahead. 

I see that my side note has turned into a digression that is simply going to be this week’s blog. See here, too, how my mind is wandering in every last direction?

Thankfully, as I mentioned above, it hasn’t kept me from reaching my daily word goals, and I’m seeing good progress on pirate tale #5. For the past two weeks, I’ve been a bit hung up on some plot aspects and how I wanted certain characters to navigate the reality I’d placed them in. It’s been a great relief (and exciting!) to have figured those things out and to have things moving along. 

Now, if only the last season of Stranger Things would come out already so I can figure out how to wrap up my fanfiction! It’s silly, I know, I just have a fabricated character I’ve enjoyed more than I thought I would, and I want to see what kind of happy ending I may be able to craft for her. 

Also, once it’s finished, it’s finished. I think my brain could do with having one less rabbit trail to get lost down. Wish me luck for staying focused as I intend to have a completed rough draft of the 5th tale by the end of next week!