The Vanguard

Happy 2010? Hope it’s decent. Hope it’s better than last year, which, by many accounts, was kinda shithouse.

Anyway. I figured I’d start posting here again, since, you know, I bothered to renew my domains and shit. Might as well use them. I am aware I kinda stopped posting late last year. I blame uni/NaNoWriMo and a general lack of intellectual thought process with which to write entries with.

I figured I’d loosen the format (wait, I have a format?) a little. Maybe not bother with trying to make super-epic formal intelekshual entries and just write something. Anything. Even if it’s me bitching about assignments. Any entry is better than none, I suppose.
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I haven’t been writing much of late. It is, perhaps, the dawning realisation that I have two weeks to write a politics essay about a topic I don’t particularly have much interest in. Ahh, fuck it, we’ll do the one about democracy. I can ramble about that for 1500 words.

Anyway. I suppose it’s been nice not feeling the urge to write so much. I mean, sometimes you need some space to just let ideas gel and emerge and form themselves into a coherent form, and sometimes that doesn’t happen when all you’re doing is writing.

Other writers might call this spate of not being able to write ‘writer’s block’. But I don’t see it that way. I’m not blocked, I’m just giving space to ideas. For me, in spite of my feeling that I would die if I couldn’t write, I don’t spend most of my time writing. I sleep, I shower, I eat, I watch TV and videos, I game, I go to class, I study, I spend time on public transport, I occasionally work. When I have the time, I write. When the muses prod me enough, I write. When I absolutely can’t keep the words in any longer, I write.
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For a long time now, I’ve wondered why it is that some writers prefer to write to instrumental music as opposed to music with lyrics, and why I’m the total opposite.

As much as I adore music, it’s written in a totally different language and my brain can’t interpret it or understand it. Now, music with lyrics, on the other hand, because there are words, written words, I can cling to them and understand them as if they’re a translation of the music. This is why instrumental music is often boring to me. There’s nothing to hold my interest and nothing to tell me what’s going on.

So while for some, music with lyrics is distracting because the lyrics distrupt their writing, for me it’s the opposite. Music with lyrics I find far easier to write to than instrumental music because it’s music I can understand. It’s like the difference between me watching a film in Cantonese (which I don’t speak), without subtitles, to watching the same film with subtitles. One I can understand, the other I can’t. Visuals aren’t enough for me to interpret what’s going on; I need the words to translate those visuals into something I can understand.
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