how i write

As a break from my New York opus, i present for your reading pleasure, a peice of work called "how i write". its a bit of uni work so its suprisingly free from swear words

I’m slumped at my desk; the time is exactly quarter past too late to be doing this. I probably wasn’t in the best state to start with because the only sleep I got last night was on my friend’s floor, after I had drunk a epic amount of gin.

By now you’re probably wondering what this has got to do with the how I write, apart from illustrating my cavalier attitude to briefs. Well I normally start most my writing with a short description of state of mind and the setting. This is because it helps turn my picture orientated dyslexic brain into one that actually uses words.

For me the writing process begins before this. Because I think in pictures mostly when I do get words stuck in my mind, they float around continually trying to attach themselves to other things, its quite tolerable, until there are too many. At that point I start on a healthy cycle of insomnia and then I am compelled to exorcise these demons by nailing them to a page. I find the main cerebral processing power when writing is taken up by stringing the words, jokes, and phrases into coherent sentences. I have no real knowledge how the words form themselves in my head, to be honest I think no one does, its like trying to accurately describe the outside of a house while sitting in its kitchen.

So when I have enough word chunks I will sit down and write, this has to be somewhere loud and busy to help me relax the thoughts out of my head, so I invariably end up in a pub. If I don’t have the right level of distraction I can’t concentrate, silence oppresses whatever the word juggling skills I need to write. If I’m honest the booze helps too.

Then it comes to typing it up; of course I immediately edit at least forty percent of what I write straight out of the text due to it being complete drivel and then I normally change the other sixty percent anyway. The typing up is the hardest part, because to add to the list of handicaps, I actually have the attention span of a five year old on speed, luckily there are enough red and green squiggles underneath my words on the screen to occupy my buzzing bored mind.

The final part is the proof reading which is done by my lovely and, more importantly, patient dyslexia tutor. This will pick up any mistakes me and my machine missed.

I think I write pretty well, some would say very well, despite being a dyslexic insomniac with a developing drinking problem. But I think it’s because I’m a dyslexic insomniac with a drinking hobby that makes me write so well. It’s certainly why I am compelled to write. And almost defiantly why I mistook the Creative Critical Writing sign up sheet for a plain old Creative Writing and accidentally signed up for a class that I am clearly out of my intellectual depth in.

thank you, more New York stuff soon