Saturday, December 8, 2012
Dusty pockets of memories in the corners of abandoned apartments
I ought to use an old film camera and take photos I can actually develop and keep, and not just digitally.
I've actually been doing some year-end cleaning these past few days. A couple of days ago we managed to find our old photo albums, and we were just looking through them and well, commenting. Because my family is just like that.
And then it suddenly hit me that one day our descendants are never going to be able to find any of that. They won't ever find old love letters. They won't ever find old journals or diaries. They won't ever find old photographs of us. All they will have of us will be only in their memories, and this vast ever-changing thing we call the internet. See, the internet needs to be new. It's one of the premises of it even being around at all. Everything ongoing, quick, fast, snap of a finger sort. There's probably no way anyone will want to keep around old photos. Even now it's all about space, usage, efficiency.
I wonder if I will ever be able to dig out photos of my youth one day.
I will probably never get the chance to say "I was thinking of you and then I found this photo we took together."
Perhaps if each photo was more expensive or took longer to develop/receive, people would cherish them more.
Sometimes I think my generation is sad, but each one has its woes. Appreciation is probably what's needed, but it's also the most lacking.
It's pretty depressing to not have something that people who don't really know of you can, um, know you by. Not know as in complete understanding, but the magical thing about little trinkets and writings and photos is that they can say a lot about any person. Sometimes the physical things are more important and more valuable than anything else.
Call me 虚荣 then but I would like to think that it's human. Everyone wants something, somehow, someway.
I just want to be remembered.
So anyway I had a very very strange dream. It was weird in a way, because I wasn't me. Not in the sense that I didn't look like me (not that I would know) but in the sense that I felt like it wasn't me.
I know, that doesn't make much sense.
It was a particularly vivid dream actually. The dream felt too real. No, it wasn't lucid dreaming, I can tell then difference. It was definitely a dream alright, but it felt real. Okay, this is vaguely difficult to explain.
Also when I say I didn't feel like myself I mean it in the way that although dream-self was thinking and doing things, they didn't feel like things I'd do. And though this can be due to the subconscious effect, I highly doubt that, because it's that dissimilar to my usual dream-selves.
Yes, I keep a diary recording the dreams I have. Seriously though I think some of them would make amazing premises for novels or short stories. And just saying the memories of the settings and proceedings of my dreams are usually very very detailed, so much that I can actually draw maps and write detailed outlines of my dreams.
The problem, of course, then becomes that of what exactly is the point/problem/plot of the dream.
Like everything.
Which very nicely links on to my next point that just suddenly occurred to me a couple of minutes ago.
I wonder why I read 言情小说, with one of the reasons being that I get bored very easily. That is strange, given that all of them are basically the same stories but in different settings.
But maybe that's what I like them for. The settings. The people. The characters. And no matter how overused the plot is the characters are almost always different and that's probably the most important thing. A story can go on with an overused or otherwise downright ridiculous plot, but the characters are what keeps the stories alive.
Which is why I am making a promise to myself, to never write a story for only a plot. If anything comes first, it must be the characters. That's what makes stories worth reading. It is the characters who in the end affect and even define what the plots are at all.
Unorthodox I know.
Also something I know a lot of people won't agree with me on, but I think I will stay my stand on this one, simply because this is what I owe my characters and my stories as a writer. The people come first. The plot comes later.
Posted at 5:49 PM
