Tuesday 5 February 2008

An extra 5 hours for me to waste tonight

Woo hoo! I'm not working tonight!

I somehow got it into my head that I should be working at Blockbusters tonight but I just phoned them and found out I'm not supposed to be working until Friday. It feels like I've gained 5 extra hours in my day today. It's almost like having a terminal disease and finding out you have longer to live than you were originally told (though not that much like it, it is kind of like a non-terminal less tragic equivalent - there's an earlier blog post where I make a very similar joke to this about a guy on death row so I don't need to go into this any further. Yes, I am a "one trick pony").

So now I have 5 extra hours to spend tonight I suppose I should use them productively. Which I could do. I feel as if i'm in a very productive mood today but I think that mood came about from thinking I didn't have much time to be productive in the first place. If I could fool myself into thinking that I had work in the evening when I don't every night I could always be in a productive mindset and get loads done.

Another reason for my enthusiasm to get some writing done is a book I started reading today. I got it from the library and it's one of those inspiring books about freeing your artistic self and overcoming creative blocks. What I've read so far isn't anything particularly new, but whenever I first start reading a new "self help" book that I haven't read before, be it on writing, or NLP, or anything like that, the first few chapters always leave me feeling like I can achieve anything. They're really inspiring, and absolutely convince you that this time will be different. That this time you're going to follow everything they say to the letter. You're going to put the effort and the time into this and it's going to change you're life in ways you never thought possible.

Then a few days later you come down from that strange high you found yourself on. Gravity has caught up with you and it has dragged you down. It's almost like sobering up. That enthusiasm and hope has faded away and you're back to your old ways because you never really worked at it long enough to get out of your old ways.

So if this always happens with these books, if it is always the way that when you're first start reading them they leave you inspired and enthusiastic for a short while before the novelty wears off and you're back to how you were before, lazy and unmotivated, what can I do to change this?

I think I may have it. What if I keep buying new self help books and just read the first few chapters?

The advice in all of them is very much the same, but that's not what you need from them anyway. You want to feel inspired and full of hope that you're going to change you're life and all of those books are very good at doing that on the intial first read. However after that it is like their charge runs out. You try reading that same introduction again and it doesn't have the same kick that it did before, much like subsequent heroin trips will never rival the feeling of that first taste (according to what i've been told of course - I wouldn't know personally... Honest).

I think it could work. I'm pretty certain that there is an almost inexaustible supply of books on creativity and writing that I can keep dipping into for those little rushes of inspiration and enthusiasm. There should at least be enough to keep me motivated and writing long enough for me to write at least one succesful script and retire to play Xbox or mess about on Facebook until the end of my days. If that fails to work then I guess I will be spending the rest of my life playing xbox and messing about on Facebook until the end of my days, because I'm not doing much more than that at the moment anyway.

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