hamansley

[hamansley]

I keep thinking about how I wrote back in school. I would write whole essays in one go. No first drafts no editing no nothing. The first draft was the final draft. And if it was legible and met the requirements I wasn’t going to waste that much time on it. 

But now I do have more time, as little as that may seem. And I care a lot more about what I write. The deadlines are what I make them, the topics are what I’m interested in, and I sure as hell I don’t have to worry about anyone grading my work. 

And in this time I finally allowed myself to write a first/rough draft and what that looks like to me.

Is it just a hand full of dialogue and a vague description of the setting and characters? Yes.

Does it make sense? It will. Even if it doesn’t right now. That’s what a first draft is. The first of many. It’s my starting point and I like revising and editing more than drafting anyways.    

[hamansley]

After almost a year after writing this I find myself wishing I had gone about that project differently. 

We as a group had decided on a company and a product to somehow sell to other companies or even governments to adopt. But the issues that come with marketing T.E.C.H homes to companies is too reminiscent of company towns and that just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I originally wanted the product to be implemented through city governments or even get the backing on the federal level, but there lies the catch. Where would the funding come from?

This project was never intended to be profitable, which is a hard selling point to make to anyone. That’s why I had wanted to pitch this idea to the government rather than companies. In large part for ethical and morality reasons. Again, company towns are all kinds of wrong. 

We we started brainstorming projects we wanted to approach the demographic trend of population discrepancies here in the US. Namely the discrepancies in population size in overcrowded cities and isolated small towns that might profit from a growing community. This idea led us to consider the growing homelessness in all major cities across the country as well as the growing concern for affordable housing for younger generations. 

To simplify everything that we were trying to do through the company’s mission and our group’s goal, we want everyone to have a place to live. 

Because everyone should have the right to housing. Everyone should have the right to safety and security and not have that be threatened. Especially based on their willingness to sell their souls. All for the profits of corporations that detest the sight of the average person’s existence. 

It’s sickening to see how people’s necessities are something to make money off of.           

[hamansley]

Two years ago today, it snowed.

I remember the night before the ice storm, when all there was was snow. I was working late at night on an art installation project. It was close to midnight. I know that because I was using the spiral staircase for the project and I wanted to make sure I could set it up, document it, and then tear it down without being in anybody’s way. The whole process took less than an hour. So, when I was cleaning up in the middle of the night I was surprised to see a bunch of residents running around, banging on doors, and yelling about all the snow outside. I was ready to go to bed but as I was going up the stairs, I had looked out the window. There was a lot of snow on the ground and it kept on coming down.

The next thing I knew, I was throwing on my heaviest coat and boots and walking across the quad to see how much the snow had covered the campus. I hadn’t seen snow like that since my freshman year of highschool. My dorm was on a hill with one of the steepest inclines on campus. people were bringing out their storage bins and poster boards and river tubes to ride down the hills. It was the most fun I’d seen people have had since covid. When the night was winding down and I had taken all the pictures that I wanted, the lobby area filled up and people brought hot drinks and coco. I saw people I hadn’t seen since the beginning of the first semester.

I thought it was quite beautiful how a weather phenomenon could bring such excitement and community to a group of people in just a few hours.

None of us could have guessed what would happen come morning. 

[hamansley]

The Thing About Starting Something

It’s that you’re never sure on how far it will go or if it will even go anywhere. The beginning is always the hardest because of that reasoning. We can’t see the future and know that any work or effort that we put into a project or an idea will even pan out. Sure we can look at past works to see how they fared but you never truly know about this time around, this instance, this dive to start something will amount to anything until you do something about it. So, you try to start it. And it’s not quite what you’d thought it would be. It might be even less of what you hoped for. 

The thing about a blank page is that it holds so much of the unknown in itself. Whether it be pixelated or fibers in a notebook, it becomes all too easy to erase a single line or a first word. And when you see that small speck in the vastness of the blank, the nothingness feels like inadequacy. 

I can’t tell you how many pages and documents and projects there are with only one paragraph, one sentence, or nothing at all. It feels almost wrong to call myself a writer with so many unfinished, barely started works. And the ones that I have finished and have been shared, I have since put away for the foreseeable future until I’ve mustered up the courage to revise and edit them. I’ll still have to reread them first though.

So, this is me starting something again. 

First was opening up a blank page. The second was writing the first words and then continuing until I got a full sentence, then a paragraph, then half a page, and then to where I am now. Slowly but surely erasing the nothingness. The horrors of a blank page.

Now I’ll let you in on how a blank page gets easier to fill. 

I never start with a blank page.

I always make sure that it’s already partly filled. Whether it be gibberish or a half thought out journal entry that has nothing to do with what I want to write, that’s where I start. Because writing a page feels a whole lot easier when there’s already one written. It feels like there is something to look forward to when you know that there is already so much that you’ve already done.

And once words start flowing and ideas keep coming, you no longer dread meeting the minimum of what you need to get done. Because in reality, for the first draft, for just starting anything, the goal is not quality. You’ll get there eventually. The goal is not even quantity. You will also get there eventually. The goal is purely something. And I would rather it be barely comprehensible and short than to stay stuck in my head forever. Because you can always fix a mistake, edit a page, and add and erase anything and everything once you put something down.

The thing about writing is that it’s hard, even for those who love it. I’m not the first to say it, but sometimes it needs to be repeated.