12-01-04

Writers lack humility. This is a fact. Writers are: the least humble, most arrogant, self-obsessed, self-indulgent, self-righteous people on the planet. For sake of being any more redundant, I'll explain. Go to any writing workshop or just sit down with a pen for a good 5 minutes. What's coming to mind? The '96 earthquake, paying a homeless man for a six pack of Mickey's in the 8th grade, my parents' divorce, the recurrent dream where Jeff Goldblum gets eaten by a shark, the time I lost my virginity and told my friends about it, the time I actually lost my virginity a few years later... Bottom line is we write from what we know-- there is no definitive fiction. Go figure right?

But, consider, of course, why we write. Unless you're a 10 year old girl with incestuous parents and a heavy menstrual flow, you don't keep your stories boxed up under lock and key. Or at least you wouldn't if someone was interested in reading them-- or, perhaps even paying to do so. Writing means reading-- necessarily. The tree falls in the woods and if nobody is there to see it or hear it or die an agonizing death beneath it-- it just didn't happen. Writing is the tree, and beyond its adolescent therapeutic benefits, this tree either does or doesn't fall depending on our readers. So, we write from what we know and hope and pray and believe that someone is going to publish our thoughts-- our lives and legacy. We writers believe that what we put forth will be worthy of the public's attention...or money. That someone might pause on his own life to peruse through ours. That maybe our perspective will intensify or substitute that of the reader. Basically, my life is cooler than yours-- paperback of hardback?

This whole issue is compounded by a few circumstances. At some level writing becomes an industry. The same way there is the film industry and not just a film-art house. There is money to be made in writing. Money in magazines and papers and books and even more money in television and the cinema. As we know, money is only an intensifier. Whatever dilemma we had before currency was established has been exaggerated exponentially (I will refrain from a tangential rant against the Wampum until a later date). So now we have every toothless Joe on the block waving his manuscript around-- everybody's got a story in the works or a deal in the post.

I think the greater problem goes beyond, though. As technology progresses, the entertainment industry grows and expands and fills the void we're left with after keyboard shortcuts and unmanned aircraft. And entertainment spreads the germ that makes us all so celebrity-obsessed. So, more-so than ever, we write and beg for someone to really buy us.

Well, here's the vicious little cycle bit. We write from what we know-- so are we living our lives with the sole intention of relaying it all back as a story? If so, are these memories really ours? Did we really pay the homeless man-- touch his cancerous hand and wait with agony and a watchful eye-- or did we stand by as a silent observer with a hardened and removed demeanor? Yeah, we're the new jesters and thread-spinners. But at what point did we stop telling tales of life and start living to tell tales?

Chuck Palahniuk calls it "a world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential... The story becomes more important than the actual event".

As writers we forget about life through proxy-- like method actors. You want the perspective of a nine year old child, conjure up all your 3rd grade memories. That of a beat alcoholic-- sit in on AA meetings or chase the green fairy young Hemingway. A butcher? A janitor? Or a psychological thriller about a transvestite serial killer? The latter sounds interesting. I think I'll read that. Here is my attention.