Skewed intakes

I feel...stale. Well, figures, I'm down with a monster of a cold and I'm doing my best to ignore it. But that's not about that, it's about a mental staleness that I've been feeling for a while now. Call it boredom, maybe, but I don't know if that's exactly it. I just feel that I'm not taking in enough.
I feel it in my writing, I find myself on shaky feet, trying to stand, to shape worlds and yet, there's something stopping me. At first, I figured I was tired, that I'd exhausted whatever resources were creating the stories in my head. And I am writing a lot, maybe I'm drawing too hard on them, I thought.
But then, as I was reading through Neil Gaiman's 'The View from the Cheap Seats', I realized what the problem was. It's not the output, it's the intake. You need to read a lot in order to write a lot, it's fairly simple. And you need to let your mind be open, to absorb phrases, thoughts, character-building.
I tend to go back to the writers who shaped me two years ago, five years ago, and that's normal. You only have so many authors who shape you. As Neil Gaiman says, sometimes just the ones who got there first.
But you also need to be taking in more, and not just read,because I do read a lot, but I think you should look to different things.

I mean, this writing thing is just a starting point, but this goes in life as well. As humans, we constantly need to be listening to different point of view. We should seek out opinions and learn about all sorts of things. Because if you stop listening, it's like you're blocking an exit, or rather an entrance, into your brain, you know? If no new information's coming in, then you're just left recycling the same old things, the same old ideas. You always need to be on the lookout for new things and to listen to different people. Maybe they don't agree with you and very probably you don't agree with them. Maybe it's a subject that never did interest you all that much, but if you don't give it a chance, then you'll never truly know.

Watch, be alive, experience and most importantly, make mistakes.

Because you'll kill yourself if you're just boiling away in your old ideas. This world we live in is teaching us that it's okay to shut off your entryways, to stick to what you think and ignore everything else. You don't like what they're saying? Ignore them, mute them, you don't need to listen to that shit.
But you do. You need to listen to as much as you can because even if you spend your whole life listening, you'll have heard less than 1% of what this world has to tell you. Be brave enough to step out of your comfort zone. Go see something you never thought you'd like. Go outside, even if you'd rather stay in.
I think many of us are just...sauteed in their own thoughts and they rethink those over and over. And it's very bad for them.

I mean, as a writer, if you stop reading or rather read the same books over and over again, no variety, no new things, then you're obviously only recycling ideas. If no new building materials are coming through, you can't build. It's fairly simple. And as a writer, if I decide those 100 books I read are enough, I'll only have them as an influence and so, my writing will become dull and lackluster, something you (or I, for that matter) will not want to read.
You need to feed yourself with ideas, with contrasting views, with news of the world that surrounds you, you must always be open. Because you expect that little guy who lives inside your head to bring forth stuff, don't you?
You don't want to be the boring guy at the party, who's saying the same old things every year. You want to be new and exciting and full of ideas. But how could you possibly do that if you don't feed that dude in your head?
Read, live, experiment, have an adventure.

I guess this post is somewhat adjacent to the one I wrote yesterday about learning. However, this is learning of a different kind. You can speak 5 languages or be a perfect ballerina, and your mind can still be stale. Don't mistake the two.

Thank you for reading,