Hippoi Athanatoi

Playing with Words

No matter how often I try to get started blogging ‘properly’ (that is, with some regularity) I can’t seem to get the decision to stick except for when it comes to chronicling my riding lessons. This may be due to everything else I do being terribly boring and really not worth writing about. It may also be the result of me being a nit picky perfectionist with certain hang-ups about either doing something ‘properly’ or not doing it at all. So when I do have stuff to post about, it feels silly to do so if its on an irregular basis. This usually leads to an end result of no posts at all. However, I am trying very hard as of a few days ago to keep myself in a writing mode as often as possible, so I might just as well use this as one of the exercises. Without, that is, trying to set any goals about doing it regularly.

Now, why would I do such a thing, someone might wonder? Well, it seems that working as a subtitler has rekindled my interest in playing around with words. So, when I am not rushing through yet another show about container ships or Finnish skydivers, I’ve found that I am suddenly interested in tinkering with a few of the stories that I’ve pondered trying to write for a good while now. It may have something to do with being forced to be extremely concise when doing the subtitling.

I am, by nature, anything but concise. So, its certainly a great exercise for me to work on saying as much as possible using a maximum of 2 lines with 37 characters each. But it also seems to lead to me actually needing to write something else as well. Which is funny, because while I’ve loved making up stories in my head for ages, I’ve always found the actual writing tedious, because my mind races ahead so much faster than my fingers can type. Especially since I can’t actually type properly. ;)

Possibly there’s also some language-related strangeness going on. My subtitling is from English to Swedish, but anything I write seems determined to come out in English. I just can’t imagine using Swedish for writing, but doing the translation to Swedish still seems to help with the writing in English. Of course, this could just all be my imagination, but either way, I am telling myself that its fine if I play around with some writing—be it the blogs or anything else—whenever I don’t have any subtitles to work on. Now, if I can just get myself to do a bit of idle art practice every day, I’ll be feeling even better, but I think I’ll take one (err, make that two, given the MUSH, but that’s sort of writing anyway) creative pursuit at a time for now.

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