Talentless Today: read at risk of boredom
Wednesday, Mar. 24, 2004 1:49 p.m.
Another thing I remember from the Mike Myers interview in Inside The Actors Studio, is the answer he gave when a student "on the playwrights track", as he described himself, asked him how he coped with the weekly script deadlines when he was doing Saturday Night Live. To the best of my elephantine memory what he said was:
"There are going to be days when you feel so talentless, so completely without talent. But the trick is to keep on going."
That's exactly how I feel now. I have nothing to write. I was silly enough to watch two episodes of CSI Season 1 on DVD and Law & Order: Criminal Intent on TV last night, when I could have turned in earlier. So I had only 5 hours of sleep and I'm behaving like my laptop, one minute of inactivity and the screen saver comes on, five minutes after that and still no activity, it shuts itself down. The time is 2.00 p.m. as I'm writing this.
The artist lives in terror of the blank canvas, and the writer lives in terror of the blank sheet of paper, the blank page, or these days, a newly created blank Microsoft Word document. I am living out that terror now. Self-doubt is creeping in; I'm wondering if writing is really my calling, whether I have what it takes to keep on churning out words and phrases and stringing them together into sentences and then paragraphs that amount to something meaningful, at least to me. If I quit my job and have more time for writing, would I necessarily write more, and write better?
Right now my mind's a blank canvas too. If I'm thinking anything at all, it's "Bed." I need sleep. Sleep, that "chief nourisher in Life's feast", as Shakespeare puts it in Macbeth.
One thing's for sure though. Today I might write crap and you may think I'm crap as well but I'm not going to give up. At least I got a little over 300 words out. It's better than nothing. I have conquered Resistance.
Older entries
Ramadan - 08 October 2006
Where I Have Been - 03 October 2006
Baby Talk - 10 August 2006
6 Weeks of Separation - 16 July 2006
Unacceptable Rudeness - 21 June 2006