Write where it hurts

In Daria, Season 2, Episode 13, Daria is given a writing assignment which she has trouble with. She's asked to write a fiction story using people she knows as characters. She comes up with many stories, but none of them are believable. None of them seem real, and this bothers her greatly. At one point she says "My whole life has been a sham, I can't write."

There are a couple very interesting things about this episode. The first thing I noticed was the creative process, which, as Daria says at one point, requires thinking (And therefore not Quinn's area). She's depicted doing said thinking at many points in the episode. I found that I could identify with these depictions quite a bit. She's seen in silence, wide awake, on her bed. She's seen staring blankly at a piece of paper, and every time it seems like she may be coming up with a good idea, she gets interrupted by people who think she's doing nothing or just being anti-social.

I think the relation I have with the above is obvious.

The second thing which interested me was quite more reveling. Daria's mom tells her that the reason she's having so much trouble writing this story is that while she is very good at being honest with what she observes around her, she almost always avoids talking about how the world around her should be. She simply hides behind a witty but cynical remark and continues to observe things how they are. She then challenges Daria to take the people she knows and write a story about how things should be, instead of intimately describing how they currently are. The story she produces is wonderful, but the whole conversation really hit home with me, because I feel like I behave much the same as Daria in this context.

I can describe the current situation in detail. Usually in a fairly interesting manner. I can identify what's good, and defiantly what's bad, and I can provide simple sound bites of solutions for the bad stuff. But the thought of How Things Should Be rarely crosses my mind and therefore I don't even have an opinion. I have opinions on the detail level, but the over-arching- not so much.

Thankfully getting the details right tends to create a good overall situation. And I am a firm believer that focusing on the overall will only let you down. The overall situation is never stable. The details you can control, the summation of those details- not as easily. However, that being said, having an overall in mind is not a bad thing, and it's perhaps something I should think about more often.

!!

I firmly blame Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! for the advent and common use of multiple exclamation points.