Dave Barry once said that you only get to write one article about writing articles, and I might be jumping the gun writing mine now considering I do have a store of a few ideas at the moment – I’m making my way through The Venture Brothers and Rick & Morty for the sake of a Double Feature article, as well as working on Metal Gear Solid‘s sequel. But I still have to work through them, and it’s been one of those weeks, and three and a half months after deciding to commit to writing at least 500 words on any topic a week, not only am I finding myself slightly creatively tapped out (much admiration for Gillianren for writing at least two articles a week), I find myself wanting to stop and take a look at what I’m doing.

I’ve hit a pretty comfortable routine for this kind of thing. I watch a show (or play a game), and I write down everything that it makes me think in a Notepad file on my laptop, as well as quotes I particularly like. When I finish, I sit down and choose an idea to start with, delete that from my Notepad file, then choose the next and delete that one and so on until I either run out of insights or the article feels like it’s done. In a way, the process is even more intuitive and irrational than the fiction I write; writing drama is a very logical process with a very clear sense of what should and should not happen – there has to be a causal link from one beat to another, and characters are limited to actions that fit their motivation – while the sense of which idea should follow another is much harder to articulate, and often leads me down a mental pathway I didn’t anticipate (I didn’t know I was going to talk about Don Draper’s backstory in my Cowboy Bebop article until it just kind of started happening). Even on rare occasions that I don’t have a central point to play with, I usually figure out the thrust of an article fairly quickly; however, I’ve learned never to plan a conclusion, because one will always seem to emerge before my eyes, sometimes right when my file empties.

(Attempts to transfer this process to writing fiction have had mixed results, which I think is less a flaw of the process and more of a Garbage In, Garbage Out situation that can be resolved by picking better ideas)

I’ve only just hit a point where I consistently really enjoy my own writing beyond the pleasure of doing it and having done it. It’s a common observation that overanalysing art destroys the magic, which I’ve never given much credence to; my stance now is that I’ve done enough work to turn on a tap and have magic pour out. Strangely enough what I’m happiest with isn’t necessarily the specific insights I bring, but the overall tone of the writing. Rereading it, I’m reminded of different writers and speakers I’ve admired – the intense density of Quentin Tarantino, the faux-formality of Douglas Adams, the nerdy playfulness of my primary school principal. During my Simpsons reviews over at the Avocado, one thing I noticed was the development of the show’s voice – not just the way the different creative voices that make up the show’s staff come together, but the way different ideas and skills come together in one specific way, where ideas have as much chemistry as people; it’s fun to discover not just my own voice, a combination of everything I ever wanted to be at once, but how mystical the concept is from the other side.

The question I find myself asking is what’s next? On a practical level, I still have a checklist of essay ideas to work on, but I generally like having some broader, grander goal to work towards; I’ve accomplished my previous goal of achieving a professional ethos towards this thing, and now I don’t know what to do with myself. I like the idea that, now I’ve gotten the meaning behind the words down to a science, I can focus energy on the aesthetic beauty of them, trying to express each sentence as beautifully as I can. I’m also toying with the idea of writing different articles with different goals of criticism, from acting as cheerleader to a work I really love, to breaking down how a work stacks up against my political beliefs, to just tearing the shit out of a terrible movie. All I can do is what I have been doing: keep writing, and keep listening to how youse guys respond.

Anyway, what I really wanted to do was have an excuse for a bunch of Simpsons references, but it felt weird to write a one-sentence article.

THE SHIELD

MAD MEN