likes – Observations and Misunderstandings

The Open University are celebrating National Novel Writing Month or #NaNoWriMo as is peoples want. They are running a daily flash fiction competition for the next eight days. Well seven as they started yesterday. You are provided with a photograph of something lockdown or Covid related and given a maximum of fifty words to write a story. It turns out to be quite challenging but that is as much down to the word limit as the fact writing stories are in general.

That is yesterdays photo and story. The photo at the top is todays so they’re going with some atmospheric and powerful black and white thing clearly. This is my entry for today. I think the end is a bit weak but I get lazy staring at something for too long and decided just to go with it. It’s all just practise anyway. Maybe not all of it but a large enough amount for it to be a thing.

“We call this one The Six Ages of Lockdown. You can see the evolution from oblivious to acceptance, and all the mischievous boredom in between”

“They look so lifelike, you’ve really captured something authentic”

“Yes, we’re very pleased with this installation”

“It’s as if the sculptor actually lived it.”

Having posted it in the comments section I’m now aware, and it’s been fifteen minutes now, that nobody has liked it. Every other has at least one, some several and there’s even the odd laughing emoji. Nobody likes to admit to these kinds of insecurities but it is enjoyable observing them in myself. We’re all human after all and we all just want a little confirmation that we’re doing something right or well. Arenas like Facebook simply feed this. Can it be seen as being part of the fallible human ideal I like to believe in I wonder. Potentially but perhaps it’s our response to our insecurities which can be looked on as the fallible part. Surely our insecurities are just some animal survival mechanism checking we did the right thing and aren’t about to get eaten. I doubt I’m going to get eaten. It’s the pit of hissing critical snakes, or even worse, the silent version which says nothing at all I’m more worried about.

The link in the hashtag at the top takes you to the actual celebration of writing month but you can enter on the Open Universities Facebook page if you too want to attempt being a short short short story teller too. I’ll see you there tomorrow, likes or no likes.

Its amazing how everything changes once you know people are reading what you’re writing. In a dream world I could say I am still writing this for myself but in this flawed one I know for sure I’m not. I can only imagine there are countless psychological studies out their explaining how and why we respond as we do when people like a post or like the blog. For the last month I have been unsure of what to write on more than a handful of occasions but now I know others might read it, I all of a sudden have an added awareness of whether what I write will be enjoyed by and create return readers. Gone are the free and wild days of my youth, my formative thirty-one days of reckless experimenting. For now I am a responsible, thoughtful and mature adult of a writer who will wow you with his intellect and insight as he goes in search of those endorphin releasing likes.

Been smashing stuff today. Yeah get some!! An internal wooden structure of four rooms taking up about a third of a warehouse. Spent the last few days carefully removing panels and now we got to the good bit when we try and collapse the whole thing. Turns out trying to knock out the supporting beams from the inside really is not the way forward. Is this a learning curve or just something we should instinctively know? Surely their must be some kind of animalistic survival instinct which makes us take stock and not do what we know to be a bad idea but then you hear about so many people who have just done stupid things it really makes you wonder. Perhaps it’s a way of nature weaning out the idiots, or simply one of the reasons humans have managed to successfully evolve over the years, our ability to observe and learn.

Anyway isn’t it typical that the very first piece in this new era of self-conscious writing comes after I’ve been whacking things hard for the last eight hours and am feeling both mentally and physically fatigued. What I am really excited about witnessing in myself though is how much my approach to this has changed with the prospect of an actual audience. Life isn’t black or white so it isn’t either a good or bad thing but I’m just a little surprised about how aware of others I now am, and in that case how it may affect my writing going forward. I’m actually quite excited to see. But I’ll leave it at that for now and please please please press the like button, I seem unable to see any value in existence anymore if you don’t.

Tag: likes

Short Story Telling

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