Nostalgia Permeates the Air

It's been a while. 

I don't even think I still remember how to blog--what is blogging, even? It's sort of like a digital diary, maybe, but I can't seem to fathom how it's gotten so popular; how my blog can be lost in the millions and millions of other blogs, never to make its real appearance amongst the ocean of others. Of course, I knew this is what was going to happen when I started this blog (nostalgia has been hitting me hard these past couple of posts), and it doesn't bother me. If it did, I would shut this business down and get a Wordpress account or something.

It's also been a year. A year since I finished a real novel... and yet, did you know that I wrote 200K words this year? That is 75K more than last year, but yet I didn't finish a thing. 

Sometimes I stare at dust particles in the light, watch them float along in the stagnant air, and I think about how I don't need to finish anything, because of the inevitability of the end of humanity. One day everything that humans did will be forgotten, like the dust in the light, and humans will have nothing to show for themselves that they did something worth doing in their time on earth (The Fault in Our Stars is a splendid book, and you should read it).

I also spend quite a lot of time thinking about adventure. I read books and watch movies and think, I want to go on an adventure. But I can't because I am stuck in the monotony of everyday, normal life (also, I am lazy and poor, which is not a good combination for going on adventures). Only in books and movies and tv shows do people get to have adventures, where they meet extraordinary people and fall in love and save the world--over and over again. 

Despite the inevitable end of humanity, I think we write stuff because we can't go on the adventures we really want to go on. We write about space ships and vampires and volcanoes and hobbits because we want to have a little slice of adventure to suck on as we continue our normal lives. 

But then I also wonder about the writers who write about normal stuff, like... books about affairs, say. What do they want out of writing that? What is their ultimate goal in writing? To find this answer, I had to formulate things down to a simple formula:

thrill=adventure

adrenaline=adventure

fear=adventure

 Or, maybe I'm over-thinking things a bit. What if it's simpler than that? What if the writing portion itself is the adventure they want to have? Perhaps it's not the subject itself but the words. The words, bubbled down, line by line. Maybe it's the fingers flying across the keyboard that's the thrill of writing for them (thrill=adventure).

Maybe it's the adventure of having other people read your writing. When The Casual Vacancy came out this September, JK Rowling released it in confidence that a lot of people were going to hate it. But also, perhaps a lot of people would love it. Did she release it with fear? Undoubtedly so (fear=adventure). 

I don't think that people would continue writing fiction if it weren't fun. There will always be a demand for it, right up until the end of humanity--and it's not like we write for aliens. We write for ourselves, perhaps the most selfish act because no matter how kind and giving we are, we will always be selfish because we make stuff for us. For humans.

Why else would we spend so many hours crafting stories and tvs and houses? We make them for humans. We are selfish, despite what we think.

But I still want to go on an adventure.