Over the weekend, I decided to make a tweak to my 100 day project because I found myself getting lazy, doing the project not as intended just to mark the day as done. And seeing as how I've established by now that I am not extraordinarily blessed with willpower and since the purpose of this project isn't to spit out words for some arbitrary 100 day goalpost for a high five at the end, I must continuously tweak, pivot, and augment to adapt to any unforeseen challenges, even if the challenge is, well, me. 

Starting today, I'll be splitting out the process of writing each poem into two phases.

Phase one: colour selection and naming.
Phase two: writing the poem.

See, what had started to happen was that I started to write poems without colours as the anchor, and then going back after the poem was done to match it up to a gradient. But the point of this exercise for me is to expand on the meaning of colour, not to assign colour to meaning. You as the reader may or may not be able to tell the difference at this point, but I think that getting to the end of the project, there would be some sort of vague feeling of it on your end too.

Now for some context. See: This post I came across by a Tumblr user called rockatransky that now leads to a dead end. 

Notice two things:

1) It doesn't take much to inspire a scene or a mood. We all know "a picture is worth a thousand words" but how much is a word worth? Sometimes we take things that sound right/nice as true, but the reverse is just as potent. 

2) There is something about language and the specificity of poetic language that does something very different than just showing the colours as is. For example, how does the meaning of "gold and blood" (from example above) change if it was instead honey and sangria? They could be the same colours. But you see how a tiny world is built through what we choose?

The whole genesis for this project was for me to get back to what I consider "the basics", to tell imaginative, evocative, and transformative (thus, gradients) stories with very few components. 

Even though technically this adds a step, it makes the process both easier and more creatively interesting. Because essentially what we're doing is breaking the essence of the project down into the smallest part possible, and then building up from there. The way I had been writing them, I was trying to make all these leaps in my head at once.

I try to always remember, especially when it comes to routine tasks, what the point is, the layer of truth underneath the easily quantified deliverable (100 poems). What the real task here is learning to build emotional scenes using only language and colour. Build better and more interesting and more evocative scenes. Experiment with scale on a conceptual level: how small can we get, how can we expand? And for me, a way back into playing with the tiniest building blocks.

"One Thing Led To Another" resumes now.