He hammered away at his keyboard, sitting at work where he should be, you know, working. Time glided on like snowflakes in the windless air -- not quite as peaceful, but every bit as slow. There was a certain sense of importance in hammering his thoughts into the nebula of the internet. Outside of the store window he saw the world screaming by in their fast cars on their broken roads.
He pauses indefinitely, as he usually does when writing.
here goes another pretentious piece about trying to relate with others. another prompt answered with half-hearted sincerity. maybe if I take the reader outside the realm of the story and bring them into the so-called "author's head" they will like it...
So that's what I'm doing. I'm showing you the motions of my thoughts in a way that is hyper-removed from the story. Removed so much from it that there isn't a story at all, just a guy who is going down the rabbit hole of writer's block and fear of pretentiousness. I'm screaming from my pedestal down in this hole hoping someone will hear me.
A guy came in to pick up some boots, didn't say nearly a word and left me back in my vacuum here. I've got 50 minutes until I grab my stuff and join everyone else out there.
Ever since meta-fiction came about (with the likes of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (which is a great read, if you're so inclined)), writers have been removing themselves from their work in a way that dilutes any meaning they put into the story. It is a sort of coping mechanism that manifests in today's use of irony and sarcasm that allows us to have real conversations with each other without anyone needing to take any real stance on an issue. Irony and sarcasm, along with meta-fiction, insulate us from sincerity in a way that is very damaging. It makes the conversation lose any meaning and become this hollow attempt at forming human connections and relationships.
I don't care if this sounds pretentious or not, or if it even makes any sense, but these are the things that keep us segregated in our own worlds -- away from each other.
(To take the meta2 a bit further, these are opinions I no longer have, as I grow as a person and a quasi-writer. They were, however, very true to me when I first discovered such people like David Foster Wallace and John Barth. It made everything I wrote seem like some hollow imitation or rehash of something already done. But fuck that, if you enjoy writing, don't worry about any of that. Just write what you want to write (and also, my writing isn't usually as jumbled and schizophrenic sounding, but it goes well with what I was feeling at the time...))