Another fucking writing journal; another fucking writer.

 Well here it is. Here's my writing journal. Another fucking writing journal; another fucking writer. Another fucking blog from me about something else. 

I just looked through the list of blog and videoblogs I've started and abandoned over the years, as I've been pursuing my creative bent. Hundreds. Great ideas, some of them. Ideas for films, for the process of my creativity, for business ideas, for my musings, and Christ knows what else. And now, this: another one, and this time one that I have the intention of working through.

I want to write a novel, you see. I've wanted to since I was a child, and I heard it said that "everyone has a novel inside them", and thought it a rather cool idea. I think it's true. Pulling it out of someone is, perhaps, another matter entirely. Sometimes I think I've lived my entire life with the idea of gaining enough experience to write a novel. I read somewhere that the definition of a life worth lived is the number and quality of stories you have about your life that you can talk about in the locker room when you're seventy.

Well, I don't know if I can do that. But I'm not seventy yet, so who knows? What I do know, however, is that this business of writing something of actual quality is far harder than I'd have imagined. I don't really know what I imagined, but it's dawning on me of late that my procrastination over this, and many other things in my life is, I realize, because I really don't believe I'm all that good at anything much at all. I've held a belief, somewhat arrogantly, that I'm some kind of genius that could turn his hand and mind to any project and make something worthwhile. Whilst I can see in all honesty that I have had one or two successes, I can't say that any creative pursuit of mine has ever been consistent. I am, if I'm honest, a bit of a wanker when it comes down to it. I've been something of a self aggrandizing fool, and have tended to listen to my own beliefs that I'd get around to doing it "one day", but that day has been pushed back further and further into the distance.

So now I'm really looking at it. And I know it means lots of work. I've been buying books left, right and center on writing, creative writing, tools for writing, style books, books about getting published, books about writing articles and getting them published, and I really haven't actually written much at all. I've just written about writing. And the business of actually doing the writing itself terrifies me, because I can look so foolish, and everyone seems to be so brilliant.

I started "The Queen's Gambit" the other day. I'm on to chapter three now. A brilliant book. A great story. Oh, to come up with something half as good! To be able to write anything like as well as that would be beyond my wildest dreams. Can I do it? If I'm really honest, I don't think I can. I really don't. Why? Because I haven't been writing since I was a child. I've been dreaming since I was a child, and I've been fantasizing about some kind of vague "success", whether as an actor or a creative in some field or another, but I've got to understand in recent weeks that my drive to do anything has been far too tied up with what people think of me than the nitty gritty business of enjoying the process of learning and actually getting any good at anything. I've treated my acting career as some kind of vehicle for revenge on everyone who dissed me as a child. I swear to God that all I've really ever wanted to do it just have all my old schoolfriends and the kids who used to bully me look in awe as I gloat, bathed in the aura of fame and success, as I look down on their mediocre lives while I live high on the hog with an artist's lifestyle of being interesting and well decked out in finery, eating at The Ivy and being a rich and famous luvvie.

But I don't think that'll happen, because I don't think I really have it in me. I'll try, of course, because that's the whole point. And hopefully I'll succeed. But I know I have to let go of the need to be rich and famous, whatever the fuck that is, or even be really, really good. I'm not a literate kinda guy. I don't really read all that much, to tell the truth. There aren't even many classics that I've read. I rarely read novels, and I have no education to speak of. 

So it's all a bit of an uphill struggle, really. It's an interesting adventure, you could say.

But this is how I'll be spending my time over the coming years, hopefully. Coming back here, to this blog, or developing it as I progress. And sharing what I learn, and the adventure I'm entering into as I do this thing.

I'm starting a writing course at the local community college in January. I'll post stuff here about that, I'm sure. 

One important thing that dawned on me today is that this project will take time. I've always been impatient, and I do understand that it's not going to all happen in a space of days or weeks. As a depressive (more about that later) I've discovered that one thing about depressives is that we want our lives to have happened already. The book needs to have already been written, and the fame and wealth and success needs to have already happened. It's the process, you see, that we can't handle. Because once everything is written, then the adoration and fame and self liking and self care and self appreciation can all be accepted. It won't be until I'm successful that I can love myself, and let someone else love me.

You know that one, right?

So that'll do for the first post.