{"id":10748,"date":"2017-09-01T17:40:59","date_gmt":"2017-09-01T17:40:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/?p=10748"},"modified":"2017-09-01T17:40:59","modified_gmt":"2017-09-01T17:40:59","slug":"0690-john-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visakanv.com\/1000\/0690-john-2\/","title":{"rendered":"0690 \u2013 john 2"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>I plan to write a novel. I think I\u2019ve gotten started on outlining it. But that\u2019s kind of vague and weird to say. A novel is a body of writing, and if you\u2019re going to write a novel then you have to get started on the body of writing. Technically my vomits so far are already several novels\u2019 worth of text, so I know that I can do the \u201cgetting out the text\u201d bit. I\u2019m suffering from a bit of performance anxiety, feeling like whatever I write is probably not going to be good enough. But I know intellectually that that is always going to be true. You gotta go to war with the army you got, not the one you wish you had. So I think from this point onwards I\u2019m going to start using my vomits to write snippets of what may or may not be from my novel. Here goes.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Let\u2019s use this vomit to talk out loud about what the book is about, generally. I didn\u2019t start with the intention of writing a \u201clocal music novel\u201d. Rather, I figured \u2013 if you\u2019re going to write a novel, it should be about some conflict, some struggle. What is a conflict that I know, that would take a novel to answer, and that I would find interesting and compelling? And the thing that came to mind was \u2013 probably the central question for a lot of work, but whatever \u2013 how do you make a difficult decision with imperfect information? And what\u2019s an example of that difficult decision? Well, you\u2019re a young person, and you want to know how you should be allocating your time and energy. How do you decide whether or not to\u2026 what? You\u2019re told to study, but what if you don\u2019t want to? What if you don\u2019t feel like it? What do you want to do instead? Pursue something that you\u2019re excited about. What are you excited about? Becoming a rock star. I remember what that felt like. I relate to it. And so I want to write a little story about a boy who wanted to be a rock star. (This feels like deja vu, probably because I\u2019ve explained it to a few different people now, and I think I actually wrote a vomit about it a while ago. But let\u2019s just keep going.)<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>So our boy John wants to be a rockstar, in sunny Singapore. What does it mean to want to be a rockstar? What are his real motivations, beyond the physical? Physically, yeah, he wants to get on stage. He wants to write songs and hear thousands of people sing it back to him. He wants to clap his hands and have thousands of people clap back. That\u2019s obviously something that feels good. But not everybody wants to be a rockstar. What\u2019s the difference between people who do and people who don\u2019t? I think what John really wants is to feel accepted, loved, for who he is. He\u2019s always felt uncomfortable and suspicious at the idea of being successful according to what other people want. And of course, he grew up listening to rock&amp;roll. His room is covered in posters of Nirvana and Guns N\u2019 Roses and Metallica and all of those things. Those guys seemed like heroes to him. I\u2019m not sure he realised just how dysfunctional and messed up some of those guys were. Or that there are so many bands that try and fail. That the default outcome for bands, in fact, is failure. For every successful band you can think of, there are probably tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of failures. But what does failure mean? What does success mean? Surely in his heart of hearts John knows that it\u2019s not actually likely that he\u2019s going to be a rock&amp;roll star. Rock music in general isn\u2019t something that people appreciate very much any more. People are all about DJs and dance music now. But he doesn\u2019t really care. He also maybe hasn\u2019t really thought about it. At some point he watched some other band perform live, and he thought, \u201cWow, that\u2019s what I want to be doing.&#8221; Those guys over there, they are _alive_, in a country where so much seems so stale and sterile and all those things that the angmohs write about us that we get defensive about.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>So John wants to learn to play music, and he wants to join a band. So first he needs to get a guitar. Should he get an acoustic guitar, or an electric guitar? He really wants to play the electric, because that\u2019s what rockstars play. But you\u2019ll look like an idiot carrying an electric guitar around. And you can\u2019t serenade a girl with an electric guitar, it\u2019s practically inaudible without amplification. So I guess John will get an acoustic guitar first. The first time he goes jamming will be the first time he tries an electric guitar. He will be impressed by how badass it sounds. But also he\u2019ll struggle to get it to sound right. He won\u2019t quite know how to mute the strings, what palm-muting is. He doesn\u2019t know what all the knobs do, what the pickups are. It\u2019s all so complicated. But he\u2019ll\u2026 pick it up.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>For John to go jamming, he has to have friends to jam with. This is where we introduce some other characters. I know I want Aurora, who\u2019s this attractive female singer-songwriter who\u2019s just so cool and elusive and maybe he\u2019ll have a crush on her. Is that too straightforward? Fuck it, let\u2019s just get it all out first. John needs to have friends to jam with. What sort of friends are they going to be? They should each have a different musical background. Someone who plays music for church. A malay dude who\u2019s into metal. Yeah it\u2019s cliche, I\u2019m going with cliches for now. They can be self-aware about it. \u201cYah, I\u2019m a mat, I like metal and marlboro, why, you got problem ah&#8221;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I plan to write a novel. I think I\u2019ve gotten started on outlining it. But that\u2019s kind of vague and weird to say. A novel is a body of writing, and if you\u2019re going to write a novel then you have to get started on the body of writing. 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