Complex Numbers

Challenges

As some of you know, my entries this month have been based on prompts in "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  [13+].

I figured if I'm going to try to write here every day anyway, I might as well go outside my comfort zone a bit and attempt entries based on other peoples' ideas.

When I was a kid, one of the writing exercises I did was to open a book to a semi-random page, grab a phrase or sentence, and expand upon it. This isn't really much different. Sometimes it's easy, and the words just flow. Other times, I have to think about it a bit. The challenge for me is to do something to make it my own - usually by means of comedy.

For a while over the past few years, the only thing I was writing were newsletter editorials, usually 2 per month. I felt like they were using up my entire creative urge, and some months I struggled to find topics. But, as I noted several entries ago, I found it doesn't really work that way, not for me, at any rate. The more I write, the more ideas I get. The more ideas I get, the more I want to write.

I guess the advice you hear is worthwhile: a writer writes. Maybe it doesn't matter that not everything is profoundly deep or funny, as long as you're writing. I should have known, really; I used to be a photographer back in the days before that medium went all-digital, and my trick was always to shoot half a dozen rolls of film in hopes of getting just one good image. And I found, then, that the more I shot, the more frequent the good images became. So yeah, if I'd been thinking straight, I might have concluded that something similar would apply to writing.

Thinking straight isn't always my strong point. But writing helps with that, too.

The hardest part of this challenge, for me, has been to write about things I wouldn't normally give half a shit about. But at least I've found that I can still write about them. This is important, because while it's good to concentrate on the things you care about, it's also good to branch out and learn new things.

If I had it all to do over again, though, the only thing I'd change is throwing in more comedy. Maybe a brick joke, but brick jokes are more funny to the writer than to the reader (a brick joke is the metaphorical equivalent of throwing a brick up in the air at the beginning of a story, and then, at the end of the story, after everyone's quite forgotten about the brick, it conks someone on the head). Or more repeated themes; what could be funnier than if I somehow worked a duck into every entry? Ducks are inherently funny, silly waddling quacking dinosaurs that they are.

Anyway, I've got less than a week left of this, and then it's probably back to (mostly) riffing on crap I find on the internet. I've got a backlog, now. I keep getting targeted with breezy articles about how to increase one's productivity. For some reason, the algorithms-that-be have me pegged as someone who gives a damn about that sort of thing. Spoiler: I'm not. But I have yet to see an article about how to reduce one's productivity, which would be more my speed.

Guess I'll have to write one.