Day 24

Day 24:

Well, I'm home from holiday, and it was quite an eventful one. While I was away, writing mostly took a back seat, although I made sure to write at least something every day (except for one day, which I'll come to later). 

I think that the most interesting thing that I can see when I look back on all of the stories is how connected they were to events in my life and how I was feeling each day. For example, by reading them it would soon become obvious that we went to the seaside and got in the sea frequently, so our schedule was dictated quite heavily by the weather. The sea and the weather have 3 dedicated days between them. You'd also be able to see that we had some serious car trouble while we were away, with two poems being dedicated to cars, driving and breakdowns. These days were ok, I started to find a new style of poetry that I like to write through these, coming in and out of the poetry to deliver this sort of dialogue, which I think is quite interesting.

However, what I consider to be by far my best work on the holiday is Day 19 and Day 20. I felt genuinely absorbed while writing them, and a little bit spooked by what I had written. I had to remind myself that it wasn't the phone or stars or aliens talking, so I hope that means that they were good. These works were inspired somewhat by my surroundings, but were not based on real events. This allows us to form a sort of diagram, with 'Observations of surroundings' on the x-axis and 'Based on real events on the y-axis. What we saw with the car and the weather were too far along the y-axis, while Days 19 and 20 were just in the middle.

Unfortunately, my worst work (in my opinion) came when I tried to write a longer story over several days. Despite my attempts to write out character development before I wrote, it became glaringly obvious to me that I had no idea what I wanted this story to be or how I wanted it to go, and I didn't really think it was interesting. This led to me leaving it for several days, and when I finally did try to continue it, I just couldn't think of anything to write. It wasn't based in reality at all, and it wasn't really much to do with my observations, I just sort of thought of a concept and ran with it. Perhaps I missed the point of my experiment, or simply did think of a good idea, then forgot what it was when I went away. Either way, I think it's best I don't try that again unless I have a very clear idea.

I'm writing this when it's quite late and after a lot of traveling, so I apologize if it's rambling. I do just want to say though, that if you are there, if you are reading this and my other stories, Thank You. Even if you are a fly on the wall, or not really there, it's a comfort to know that somebody may be made to smile by reading these, which I suppose is the point, at the end of the day :)